While I sympathise with your headdress conundrum, I suspect that it can easily be resolved by a visit to the barber :).
Regarding your comment about sickle-cell anaemia in black people being the result of inbreeding, I am not so sure.
With about a third of the black population carryingt the trait, it is safe to say that for it to have resulted from marrying one’s close relative, the practice must have been very widely spread in Africa, which it isn’t.
Unlike Tay-Sachs, sickle-cell anaemia offers a benefit to the carrier which suggests that people who were not carriers died out more readily from malaria that thoes who were. Leaving just the carriers to breed on, regardless of their inter-relatedness.
Sure, but an evolutionary timescale is quite divorced from a human one so we probably wont notice the very small contiguous differences in our lifetime. The majority of change occurs in “junk” DNA, changes that affect the way vital proteins are formed are usually harmful.
I suppose that’s a different perspective to your point about humans adapting to their environment, which does occur: but using evolution to justify policies would be Social Darwinism (again, not that you implied that).
The fact is, evolution is dog slow even under optimal conditions (large genetic diversity and/or high mutation rate, and high pre-senescence death rate). And we are far from those “optimal” conditions.
Meanwhile we’ll probably have the means and will to enhance and customize just about everything about our appearance and mental faculties within a couple of centuries.
Opinion has shifted in the last 20 year. There is strong evidence that we are evolving faster than ever. Mostly because of the number of people alive today. More people, more mutations. Recent (last 40,000 years or so): adult lactose tolerance, blue eyes, white skin, smaller jaws and teeth, blonde hair. Take a look at the facial structure of Asians vs Africans vs Caucasians. 10% of people of European descent are immune to smallpox, HIV and highly resistant to the plague. And these are just traits that have become common. No, we haven’t developed extra arms or psi, but evolution is the accumulation of small changes.
Or, take a look at the human genome project, which found something like six genes which account for “race” (last I checked) and far more variety within “races” than between “races”. The variance is mostly superficial, though I’d like to see a cite for your claim about immunity.
There are a lot of articles out there about the immunity of some Europeans that made it through the black death while being in close contact with the disease. Others didn’t get sick because they avoided the people with the plague or lived in seclusion. The ones who were not in contact can still have the immunity because it appears the immunity existed before the onset of the plague. It only gives HIV resistance though. I’m surprised you haven’t run into any of these articles gamerunknown.
Can you give me links? These are journalistic articles rather than academic sources and they are actually complete non sequiturs from your previous comments apart from the fact that they both mention the plague. I don’t think the germ theory of disease is under contention, nor is the existence of the immune system, nor that immunities could have a genetic (or at least hereditary) component. I don’t think they demonstrate that the human race is “evolving” on a noticable timescale (namely, a non-evolutionary timescale). It is a truism that contiguous differences will mean that it will never be possible within a human’s lifetime to establish a taxonomic difference between relatives.
It depends on what you mean by natural. If natural selection equates to anything in the physical universe, that’s a truism… However, there are many interventions by humans that serve to cause our genes to propagate (or not) beyond what the unthinking environment provided for us (artificial selection if you like).Medicine would be one example, chemical castration would be another. I’m not hostile to the idea of human evolution necessarily, I just don’t think we can derive any facts about how society Ought to be run from the fact that we Are evolving.