one extra comma, and all my coding is for naught. I must be dense…
Waverly, I apparently missed that you agreed. Sorry, I didn’t mean to belittle your intelligence.
As for “Eventually Bending to the Rules of Selection” – I just don’t see what you are saying. Are you saying that even though at a micro level, we all make individual decisions, then seen at a whole, we will fufill some natural selection for certain traits? So, for instance, even though people marry not based soley on beauty(defined in some arbitrary way), in millions of years we will be more beautiful anyways since selection is at work? If so, I can only say, good luck arguing your case – our societies are complicated enough so as to thwart such attempts well – after all, it is difficult to see how china’s two children policy is doing ANYTHING to selection at all – if it were a perfectly implemented policy ( exactly 50% gender balance, everyone must get married, everyone must produce children ), then no selection would be happening at all*.
I could continue, but it might help if I understood exactly what you meant by your comment.
Or, as another friend said: “I don’t WANT to be part of Natural Selection. I don’t want half of my children to die before having children. I don’t want to have to have many babies just so some will survive.”
Me’Corva
*Note: Of course, in my china example, even in a perfect world, some combinations of genes would cause the children to die before they could reproduce. So, SOME selection would be occurring. But, since selection happens two ways: can you survive to produce children, and can you find a mate who will produce children with you, our example is essentially cutting off one entire avenue of selection. So, selection would occur more slowly – and as our medicine approaches Perfect Medicine ™, the less selection is occuring. (since more people live through “unlivable conditions”)
Warning: Satirical and ironic Public Service Announcement:
“Do your species a favor, don’t have sex with fat people!”
Waverly: Yes, in the long run, evolution will work. If obesity causes lower fitness then it will be selected against. But this will take many thousands of years. And the likelyhood is that our enviroment won’t be stable enough for all these conflicting trends to get very far. After all, susceptability to obesity is really an adaptation to scarcity…the body uses food more efficiently. Remove the scarcity and suddenly it isn’t an advantage anymore and is selected against. Then suddenly you have scarcity again and the thin people starve.
Of course there is selective pressure on humans, and of course we are still evolving. But the directions are many and various and constantly changing.
No prob. on point one. It’s a difficult medium to communicate in.
Not really what I am saying in point two. In simple terms, I’m saying that man is just another animal, and the course of his evolution will be dictated by natural selection whether we like it or not. I am also saying that we are social animals to such an extent that in part our society functions like one large organism, societal effects sometimes overshadowing those of the individual. Perhaps a poor example, but let’s give it a try: an artist may have a very desirable set of skills, but few of them translate well into survival skills. However, in our society, said artist can readily trade what he or she does best for the things they do need to thrive. Whether genetic or learned, adeptness at art is now a practical skill than can make you quite competitive.
I am not sure I understand your beauty example. I think the implication is not so much we will be more ‘beautiful’ (that is way too subjective and the ideal changes too rapidly.) Rather, we will change, and the changes that are most successful will become more common until they are the rule not the exception.
China’s two child limit changes things, but still isn’t an inoculation against selection. Here are just couple thing to consider: What is going to be the genetic make-up of the two children? Aren’t faster sperm, heartier eggs, children resistant to still birth and SIDs all going to have an advantage?
I think it’s too difficult to predict, but I agree with you that evolution will work in the long run, and with your other points as well. Perhaps lower metabolisms, once desirable, will give way to faster less efficient metabolisms. Or maybe society does such a good job of minimizing the effect of weight that is will not become a disadvantage. Perhaps the environment will throw us such a curve that lower metabolism will indeed once again impart a benefit.
Okay, so, we have a lot in common. We both agree that humans are another animal, and so evolution, in it’s broadest strokes affects them as well.
And, you have a good example about the artist – it is true that artists may be selected for in the short term, even though in the “wild”, sitting around and moping is a bad survival skill.
However, Art, Beauty, and all these social constructs are examples of my primary hypothesis, which maybe can be stated as such:
“If civilization continues for another million years, man will continue to diversify in every attribute instead of contracting”.
So, let us pick a descrete variable affected only by genetics, number of toes when born. People will have more diversity in the number of toes in another million years as compared to less.
As a more complex example: XWeight (and this is really the genetic component of weight – so the weight people would become based on X(where X is a generic environment that we make up for comparison.)). 30 000 years ago, everyone XWeight would be pretty similar. Now, everyones XWeight isn’t quite so close. In a million years, everyones XWeight will be much more diverse.
And, this is all based on the fact that in our society, there really aren’t stable disadvantages to being large/small. ( stable being defined as “for the last 10000 years”) And we need stability (or massive decimation of population) for evolution to work. But, all this is my simplification, as IANAEvolutionary Biologist.
So, in that sense, Evolution hasn’t affected us almost at all.
Me’Corva
And, yes, your rebuttal about china is valid. You bring up the only possible reasons why there may be some selection occuring. But, without going through each individual point – you should see my point, that if we check back in 1000 years, China will have diversified more than a control group like Canada, since canada is still selecting somewhat based on how many children people produce. And, if we make a new XChina (in our imagination), where we control everything, we can get very close to exactly no selection. SIDs a problem? Fine, make medicine better. Still birth a problem? Fine, make everyone incubated from conception. Etc… My point is, the less you die when you don’t fit the ideal, the more likely the population is to diversify.
<Thinking this through…> Let’s see. If natural selection is working on the set of available traits, but we somehow do our best to minimize the negative impact on any of these traits, then yes I think the available field of traits will continue to grow at the rate of random mutations, unchecked by selection weeding out those that would otherwise be unsuccessful. [how’s that for a run on sentence?]
Conversely, heavily tax a population with a severe environmental change or disease, and rather quickly any trait offering an advantage will begin to increase in distribution, those traits making individuals more susceptible to the danger at hand will begin to disappear.
I would just like to add the caveat that we can approach, but never reach such a degree of control over our environment. I find the extent of control required approximately equivalent to the frictionless system necessary to keep a top spinning for eternity – theoretically interesting, but impossible in practice.
ug, Phobos good. 