He’s talking about genetic engineering, biotechnology, computer augments, etc. Glasses, antibiotics, safe municipal water supplies, vaccination, etc.
I was speaking of healthy populations. I didn’t speak of all situations. Population bottlenecks are bad. Lack of genetic diversity leads to a mess - we call it inbreeding.
Huntington’s disease will kill you slowly and painfully in your 40s, but it increases fertility when you are young. So it gets passed on.
Like I mentioned earlier, right now natural selection is selecting for less educated, less intelligent, less wealthy people in the human race. Evolution is just about who breeds more and whose children reach reproductive age more.
bolding is mine.
The second half of your statement is true. The simplistic way to look at nature is this; Nature is effective, not efficient.
I find the first half of your statement to be almost nonsense in the context of evolution. Education and wealth are indicators of nothing but chance and circumstance not directly related to fitness to breed. Intelligence is more directly related, but intelligence is or can be a highly subjective thing and is difficult to measure. Was that chimpanzee intelligent or merely lucky at avoiding being eaten by the panther and successfully reproducing before getting killed in a confrontation with another troop of chimps?
People keep saying it, evolution doesn’t select for anything except the ability to successfully produce the next generation of beings the most times.
Specialization can be a negative – more specialized creatures are the first to die when there are significant changes to the environment. Think about it this way – a creature that fills a very specialized niche is not going to do well when that niche disappears. It’s wrong to think of all evolutionary change as an improvement – that’s a value judgment that has no place in science. traits that help you survive one bad winter, can kill you, or can even cause your species to go extinct the next.
Furthermore, being too good at filling a niche can be a negative as well. Normally, if a creature is a good hunter, for example, it will drive the population down of its chosen prey, and then its own population will drop because not enough food is available to feed the current population, and you can get a cycle of population yo-yoing over and over again. And that’s ok… unless that hunter acquires a trait that makes it TOO good at hunting, in which case it can drive itself to extinction, sometimes taking other species with it.
Some of the hardiest creatures are the least specialized – they may not be the brightest bulbs on the shelf, they may not be the best hunters or the best at anything. But when one food source is gone, they aren’t too specialized that they can’t turn to another. There are a few species like that, that have survived millennia, simply because they are NOT specialized. Hell, humans are fairly unspecialized – hence, we can dominate any niche. And that can also be a problem, as we’ve seen we are capable of wiping out entire niches – not just one niche, as in my example of the overly evolved hunter, but multiple niches.
Haldurson, I think we are talking past each other making different points.
My point is that species population traits change over time. If those changes are neutral, the rate in the population floats without a specific direction. If those changes have an adverse affect on population survivability, they get weeded out of the population over time. If those changes provide a competitive advantage to reproductive success, they get disseminated throughout the population as a whole, unless they also contain an inherent weakness (e.g. sickle-cell anemia). The environment can change, making formerly positive traits negative and formerly negative traits positive, and that can adjust the direction of change for those traits.
The point I was making was, like the development of the eye, as positive traits provide significant survival advantage, they quickly spread to the whole population, out-succeeding the individuals that don’t have those traits. So we don’t find humans with half-finished eyes, but we do find a lot of different types of eye in other species, and some other eyes in different states than human one.
Remember, I was addressing this statement by adaher:
I was attempting to explain why it appears to be that way, not explain every aspect of how evolution works.
I disagree. Intelligence has been studied for a century, and it is integral to improving our collective quality of life. Intelligence is necessary for science and technology, and necessary for large social groups. If everyones intellect was cut in half, then say goodbye to vaccines, clean drinking water, international travel, the internet, physicians, etc. It is our only chance to escape the cycle of evolution, and right now natural selection is selecting against it.
Ok, I understand that this factoid: “We’re evolving to be more stupid” is very popular (particularly among certain groups). But there are strong reasons why if it’s not outright wrong, it’s at least besides the point:
1. Evolution slow, human progress fast
First and foremost is the simple fact that evolution is crazy slow compared to the rate we humans move the goalposts. In my lifetime we’ve sequenced the human genome and now we have crispr-cas9 and the first therapies that modify genes in adults already in human trials. Also in my lifetime, countless countries that had high birth rates and an exploding population have dropped right down to barely replacement levels.
As for economics, I’m typing this from an area of Shanghai that was little more than a fishing village when I was born and is now home to many of the world’s tallest skyscrapers.
The world is changing much faster than evolution can keep up with.
2. Do stupid people have more children?
The correlation for the most part is between poverty and birth rates, particularly when looking at it on global scales.
And these things are clearly not the same. Take a baby out of Poorsville and raise it in Richtown and it’s much more likely to succeed academically, then professionally, then choose to have fewer children.
You see it most clearly in countries like India. There you have areas of high birth rates and low prospects coexisting with areas that educate future MIT graduates. Are they genetically so different? If we swapped two kids would the kid born in Richtown but then raised in squalor still succeed?
3. You don’t need to be smart for most jobs
I even want to push back against this part.
It’s a standard meme of Western culture, particularly in the US, that Job A requires an IQ >= X. For a doctor, say, people might guess it must be 120+.
Here in China they emphasize hard work and good teaching and almost zero stock in IQ and I think the Chinese are more correct than the Americans on this one.
Just look at Ben Carson. I hear people now scoffing at the idea that he was a great neurosurgeon, despite all the evidence. Because, to them, a neurosurgeon must have a very high IQ (especially a distinguished neurosurgeon), and if he has a high IQ that should be obvious at all times.
As someone who has worked in neuroscience myself I’m not at all surprised to see a great neurosurgeon talking crap because I’ve met several that were like that. The field is not about constantly trying to think outside the box (few fields are). It’s mostly following particular processes well. These processes, though complex, are well within the reach of someone with average IQ, or maybe less.
And when a neurosurgeon must do something very novel then yes, their aptitude comes into play but here aptitude involves many psychological factors beyond just IQ.
I think it was Freakonomics that mentioned the greatest indicator of whether a child would do well in life was the education level of the parents. Of course, like statistics, this is not always the whole story. My father was a physics professor, my uncle was a pig farmer. It seems that learning how to use your brain is as important to developing IQ as is genetics.
The whole “stupid people are having more children” was the basis for Cyril Kornbluth’s “The Marching Morons” even back in 1950’s, where the vast majority of society is stupid for allegedly the same reason (abetted by the excuse that the best and brightest and fittest were chose to emigrate off-planet). Of course, birth control (and abortion) are readily available now, so even the poor can skip having children when they don’t want them in the first world. Plus, if we go with the concept that people are not poor because they are stupid, but rather stupid(er) because they are poor - they have the potential but due to upbringing and lack of opportunity, failed to develop their full potential.
I believe the greater effect would be the increased fertility, due to incompetant use of condoms. Because that has an immediate effect, while the decreased fertility caused by alcohol use tends to be an accumulative effect from chronic use/abuse of alcohol, which takes longer to have an effect.
If those below the average IQ are having double the number of children as those who are above it, then in one generation (if we ignore regression to the mean) you’ve already switched the ratio of smarts to dumbs from 1:1 to 1:2. That’s pretty fast.
Not to say that this is the state of affairs. The Flynn effect, last I heard, was still marching along strong and that would seem to be a strong indicator that it isn’t.
But, in theory, evolution could move quite fast if there were sufficiently strong subcultural tendencies around procreating.