Exactly. It’s like asking “In 100,000 years time, when continental drift means Jamaica is only half as far away, will a ferry crossing still cost $50?”. Arguably this is a less silly question than the future of human evolution, because the continents’ movement is unlikely to be affected by human activities, but because continental drift doesn’t have the baggage of misconceptions that evolution has, it can illustrate the problem with that way of thinking.
We have our fair share of cognitive biases and blindspots that’s for sure.
On lies though, it’s not quite as simple as you say. One hypothesis for example is that one of the reasons Homo’s brains had such a runaway increase in intelligence is because it became an issue, not of being smart enough to hunt or escape predators, but being smarter than the next man. And that being able to tell if someone was cheating you became very important.
Certainly modern humans seem to instinctively develop an idea of fair vs cheating.
Unfortunately though, for facts, it seems we put a lot of stock in who the messenger is. If it’s someone we trust, or want to follow, the default is to accept what they are saying.
There will almost certainly be variations on how well augmentation and longevity treatments work across the populace. These will almost certainly be partly genetic in origin.
So, those for which the treatments work best will stop ageing and get really smart. This tends to reduce the reproduction rate. Those for which the treatments don’t work so well, will thus tend to out-reproduce those for which the treatments work.
Problems with breastfeeding might be a partially genetic problem that interferes with reproduction. Modern humans have solutions to solve the problem (baby formula, heating devices), so I doubt evolution will correct for that.
The key thing is our mental systems are optimized for dealing with a couple dozen to maaaybe 100 people and dealing with those same people every day of our lives.
This breaks down when asked to live in a society composed of hundreds of millions. Our concepts of Us, Them, trust, reciprocity, etc., are operating well outside their design parameters. With the predictable failure modes.
Of course there’s also the problem that as humans evolved to be smarter at detecting cheating, the cheaters equally got smarter at hiding cheating.
In the modern world where cheaters can control multi-million dollar advertising campaigns the ordinary person is at further disadvantage. It doesn’t matter if they’re selling timeshares, toothpaste, or Trump; they can do it more effectively than many (most?) people can effectively counter.
To get back to the OP - humans should not be able to turn off pain; allowing conscious control of pain levels, for example, would lead people to tune out relevant pain rather than addressing the situation. pain indicating your back is sore, you have a herniated disk - sometimes this sort of pain is intended to make you avoid placing a load on the problem area until it can heal. If you can ignore the pain and walk on your broken ankle, you are only making it worse and delaying healing time.
As for fat storage - this has only been a problem for a generation or three. For every Henry VIII who had to turn sideways to get through doors (the least of his medical problems, apparently) there were a few million Englishmen whose tendency to accumulate fat was irrelevant. Widespread obesity has only been an issue in the last half century at most and only in some areas of the Western world. So up until now, there really has not been a tendency to select against those who accumulate fat - indeed, the opposite. People who could pack away the pounds at harvest easily before winter food shortages set in, had a better survival odds.
Plus, as repeatedly pointed out, traits have to have a demonstrable effect on reproductive success to affect evolution; beer goggles notwithstanding- economics, social behaviour and technology play a greater role that genetics in reproduction rates nowadays.
(Recall a discussion - I think it was Freakonomics - that women in the end nowadays usually have as many children as they choose/plan to have. Any “oops” earlier in life just means they have fewer children later in life.)
This is not by any inherent ability to predict what will be valuable for survival. Rather, the mechanism of natural selection works against the individuals that do not have traits that give them an advantage. The acquisition of those traits is by mutation.
For example, say rabbits have short ears. A rabbit is born with slightly longer ears. That rabbit can hear predators a bit earlier than his neighbors, and can therefore respond more quickly. He is more likely to survive and reproduce more. That trait builds up to long ears in rabbits, because the shorter eared rabbits get killed off more.
The traits that fit the environment get pushed by natural selection to improve, with the lesser versions disappearing by outcompetition. The traits that don’t aid the environment don’t improve. They might drift around, or even atrophy, but to improve it requires reproductive advantage.
For example, some snakes (pit vipers) have pits on their face that are sensitive to infrared. Those pits are proto-eyes in the infrared spectrum. They give an sense and a bit of direction to that sense. They help the snakes detect body heat for finding prey.
The OP has a misunderstanding about how evolution works. It’s not a mechanism that drives creatures towards perfection. It’s about natural (and with humans, sometimes, and in the future, unnatural) selection. What happens is that if a genetic trait appears in a population, and that trait, for some reason, gives an advantage such that more offspring survive to a breeding age, then it’s likely that that trait will continue to be passed on.
There are a few different ways this can happen – a trait can increase the survival of young, it can increase the number of offspring, or it can give an advantage in the breeding process itself.
Note that this means that a trait which can help a child reach breeding age, can actually be a disadvantage in an aging organism. Your example about fat storage, for example, is not as much of a disadvantage early in life.
Also, a trait has to actually exist for it to be passed on. Traits don’t simply appear because it would be an advantage. Traits may already exist in a population, or they can appear as mutations, or they can enter from other populations (mitochondrion, for example, may have become part of animal cells from bacteria). IT may be that some creature would have a great advantage within its niche if it grew wheels instead of feet – but DNA may be incapable of producing wheels.
Traits don’t improve – they either survive or they don’t.
There are more complex traits that are controlled by multiple pieces of DNA, and that may be what you are thinking of. There are multiple traits that are linked to a propensity towards addiction, for example. There are multiple traits that are linked to a propensity to higher intelligence.
And some traits that give an advantage may also give a disadvantage. For example, the ability to breed more offspring may seem like an advantage in nature. But every niche has limited resources, and such an ‘advantage’, if it’s too ‘good’ may actually drive that species towards extinction.
Furthermore, evolution can push creatures towards specialization to a given niche. Lots of fur and fat and so on is a real advantage in colder climates. But if things warm up, not so much. Sometimes less evolved creatures tend to be hardier and more resilient to changes in the environment. Again, it’s not about perfection, it’s about the ability to survive to breeding age within a given niche.
What’s caused a lot of confusion is the misuse of the word evolution in non-scientific circles to be synonymous with “improvement”. But that’s not what it actually means in scientific terms. It’s simply about surviving and breeding, and that doesn’t always mean improving.
Exactly. Humans don’t have a fat problem, for example - they have a motion problem and an appetite problem. We are evolved to take advantage of excess food supply, since the next season may be lean. Our bodies are finely tuned to balance the need to store energy vs. the need to accommodate the level of activity we typically use to survive. Unfortunately, in modern society, both those points are now at an extreme end of the spectrum.
Does it matter, evolution-wise? Not really. People don’t choose to have children based on their appetite or body mass. Only the extremes - the people who weigh, say, 400 pounds or more - would (maybe) find that an impediment to reproduction - meaning in a millennia or two or five, maybe the tendency to have “run-away” obesity cases would be less. .
Except that nature is stupid sometimes. Pain and itching are both examples of this, itching even moreso than pain.
The worst thing you can do for a minor to moderate sprain is to stay off of it. Yes, it hurts, but keeping it moving, strengthening it, and keeping or increasing the flexibility of the joint will do far more to promote long term healing than rest. So if we could have evolved the ability for burns, broken bones, and cardiac conditions (the causes of pain where withdrawal and immobility are actually good) to be painful, but not sprains, inflamed joints, or nerves, that woulda been great. But it doesn’t work like that.
Likewise, I can’t think of a single situation in which scratching a severe itch actually makes things better. It doesn’t seem to make a lick of evolutionary sense that our relief from itching is scratching. It’s just one of those things that just is, because it happened in our DNA at some point, and it didn’t *impede *us from having babies.
Not every evolutionary change is a positive one. Sometimes they’re neutral, sometimes they’re negative but not so much as to affect reproduction or the raising of offspring.
But how often is that the case? Even lice can’t be dislodged by scratching, only momentarily annoyed and repositioned. Scratching just spreads scabies. Evolution “dealt” with most topical parasites by taking away our fur and fixed bedding (until we screwed that up by building houses and mattresses).
There are far more causes of itching made worse by scratching than there are causes of itching solved by scratching.
Furthermore, if you look at the comparison of human eyes with squid eyes in the Camera-type Eye section, you’ll see that cephalopods got it right(er). In vertebrate eyes, light has to pass through the retina to get to the the photo-sensing layer. This is why all the nerve cells gather together in a bunch to pass out of the eyeball, creating the blind spot. Squid eyes have it the way any simpleton would have designed it, with the light sensing done on top of the retina so the conducting nerves can gather together away from the image-forming part. Intelligent design, indeed.
Don’t even get me started on how primates had to kludge back one of the two lost color sensors fish, reptiles, and birds have to improve our color vision.
How do you say “What do you mean ‘we,’ White Man?” in Mandarin? If you’re going to cite irrelevant information (i.e., non-cite) at least be consistent: as a species, abortion is increasing.
And alcohol lowers the success rate of condom use, so drunks should, in theory, be more fertile even with the use of the most common contraception. (Of course, alcohol lowers fertility rates too, so I’m not sure which has the greater effect.)
Of course traits improve. How else does specialization work?
Maybe a more accurate thing to say is that traits accumulate and the resulting improvement outperforms those without the trait. Thus the population as a whole fits their environment better.
It does a pretty good job of telling you if you have sustained any major damage.
There are multiple layers to pain.
Yea stubbing toe gives an immediate high burst, telling you hey stop, you’re going to bust this nubby here.
But then it subsides after the initial warning isn’t needed any more.
Snap your arm in two though, and it’s a different story, it keeps firing off high alert messages, Hey there major malfunction here!
Because you can not Evolve out famine and similar situations, or climate.
Since all animals have this ability in some degree, and have for a very long time, i doubt mother nature is going to evolve this useful feature out of anything
Some people can, but on average i don’t think most people would enjoy that much awareness.
It would be overload, how would you like to be acutely aware of what your intestines are doing, or gallbladder, or heart, or kidneys, at any given moment of the day?
Imagine trying to think, or trying to sleep.
Yes, it would be very useful, that’s why the human body, and other animal bodies can already do this.
People do things in desperate situations all the time where they do not realize until later how bad they were hurt, or how much pain they were actually in.
I imagine it depends a lot on your particular mental state, some people just are not capable of shutting off their panic states and would simply flail around screaming.
Intelligence does not factor in really, not the things you are speaking of.
Environmental pressures and selective breeding might, though humans only tend to do selective breeding under such lovely programs like the 3rd Reich and such.
And we know how well those lovely programs work.
Humans breed for love or lust or boredom or religion or intoxication or to get on a talk show, so i think we will always be wonderfully imperfect and pee in the face of future evolution
I don’t think too many people have had success using “get blind drunk” as a contraceptive technique. Men, maybe. Not women.
The same as all these other issues; caffeine, obesity, starvation, breastfeeding, etc. - maybe lower sperm count, or inhibit ovulation, or make implantation less likely. However, considering how often humans attempt reproduction, and how erratic success is anyway, a few extra months to get to success is likely irrelevant.
And all those details are irrelevant when we use our conscious control to determine that “one or two children is plenty” and over a lifetime, there is no reproductive difference.
