Hey guys, i’ve got this doubt:
Does (darwinian-modern) evolution work on individuals or group-wise?
I have this question because a friend of mine who thinks he’s got bad genes, asked me theoretically if he really was a “beta” male wouldnt he be doing a favor to humankind by suiciding?
Thank you in advance.
There are no such thing as bad genes in evolution. The species with the largest gene set is most likely to survive. Suicide is anti-evolution in every respect. Contrary to what a recent Ben Stein production says, so is genocide. Every individual is important to making sure that the natural course of evolution takes place.
Today’s “bad” genes could be tomorrow’s “good” genes, I’d tell him not to do anything rash.
Not sure I entirely understand your question, but evolution works in populations and manifests itself in slight changes from generation to generation. When a beficial mutation emerges within a population, that mutation will get passed down to offspring and eventually, individuals with that beneficial gene change will out-reproduce those without it until only individuals with it are left. Individual do not change or evolve. They are always born with whatever beneficial change they’ve inherited either through heredity or mutation.
Even if such a thing as “bad genes” existed, suicide would not alter the gene pool. A condom would do the trick just as easily. Your friend is misguided if he thinks that his mere existence can affect evolution. Even if he reproduces, he still can’t hurt the gene pool and has as much chance of helping it as anybody else.
Natural selection operates on individuals, but populations - not individuals - evolve.
Perhaps if humans were at the minimum viable population, the genetic makeup of a particular individual might matter in an evolutionary sense. However, we passed that population level a very long time ago. No individual these days will have any measurable effect one way or the other on the gene pool of Homo sapiens.
Suicide is a selfish, and self centered act. Other than eliminating some very small amount of competition for resources, it is entirely unrelated to evolution, except in populations large enough to allow suicide to change the survival characteristics of the entire species. Generally, a suicidal gene does not get inherited, and can have only a brief affect on the evolution of a species.
Imaginary lemmings, for instance. If there were lemmings who periodically engaged in mass suicide, the species would limit self competition for resources. But, the benefit of such a genetic behavior would accrue to those who did not show the behavior. That would cause the gene for suicide to be preferentially not selected to some fairly major extent. (Or, a counter suicide gene to be very highly selected, which would accomplish the same thing.) Over a fairly short period, perhaps measured in thousands of years, in both cases the natural selection for survival would eliminate genetically induced suicide from the species, since by definition, the offspring of the species would be the survivors, and inherit survivor genes.
Tris
Evolution doesn’t have any purpose beyond “reproduce”, so the genes you have are replicated and passed on. That’s it. It isn’t trying to make people smarter or taller, better looking or even more happy. Just pass those genes on, as many copies of them as possible, and that makes them successful genes. From a gene’s point of view, anyway.
Your friend’s genes have come a long way, successfully passed themselves on through hundreds of thousands of generations or more. That makes them “good” genes by definition. Good at getting themselves passed on and surviving. Whether the gene carriers involved (that’s us monkeys) were alphas, betas, Flashhearts or Baldricks is entirely beside the point. All those generations of your friend’s ancestors survived long enough to outcompete their neighbours, get together and have babies. They kept those babies alive long enough to grow and learn to look after themselves, and to later have babies of their own. Every generation, over a long, long chain, leading up to your friend! His genes are fine, even if he isn’t so happy about them.
So he’s blue about his genes, huh? Well, it’s not about improvement, but just plain survival. That’s denim of the game.
I see. Why is it then that we feel atracted to qualities such as inteligence, honesty, good looks, etc? If the only thing evolution cares is passing genes, why chose? Why not just pass them to everyone? Why are we selective?
Well, my understanding is that females are selective due to the enormous time and effort required to raise offspring to maturity. You’re looking at 15-20 years there.
Males, on the other hand, at least in my experience, are far less selective about the choice of mating partners.
We aren’t. That is, we as a group will mate with just about anyone, barring obvious signs of illness like oozing sores (and even then…). While individuals have individual tastes and preferences -and yes, there’s a tendency towards *attraction *to an ideal that may be a more fertile body type biologically, or a better provider socioeconomically - look around. People take mates who aren’t their ideal all the time. Enough people with enough variety of genes to reduce the risk of congenital disease successfully mate to keep us going as a species. Individuals? Well, it’s something of a crap shoot, but our continued survival doesn’t consider your personal happiness, just that enough of us breed to keep our numbers up.
I don’t have any ethical or moral problems with suicide, by the way. Maybe your friend really does have “bad genes” in the sense that he’d be stacking the deck against his potential children. I have to admit that if I was a diabetic Parkinson’s patient with hemophilia, I’d probably choose not to breed, as well. But that doesn’t mean I’d need to suicide, just that I’d get a vasectomy or tubal ligation and adopt children.
If you could pass your genes on by just spitting out little clones of yourself, or by growing twice the size and fissioning in two, that’s what we’d all be doing, as often as we could! And some species do just that.
But there are advantages to shuffling the deck each time; it keeps diseases and parasites playing catch-up. So we pass our genes on by having kids, and that means finding partners and mating. And then, since our kids take a LOT of looking after before they can make their own way in the world, we also have to invest time and resources into raising them for a while.
Each child of yours will carry genes from you and your mate. Your genes will have the best chance of propagating if you and your mate are healthy and fertile and good providers. So we have evolved to be attracted to the outward signs of health and fertility and productiveness:- genes promoting such tendencies in us have been more successful than genes that don’t.
Because those of us that are attracted to those have more offspring who have more offspring etc. That’s what evolution is. Being selective produces different outcomes.
Evolution doesn’t have a purpose, period. It is the result, not the cause, of reproduction.
Nitpick: each individual that has a child has a small effect on the gene pool, about one in 6 billion. Insignificant maybe, but measurable.
As others have said, if a person wants to eliminate himself from the gene pool, all he has to do is not have biological children. There is no need for him to die prematurely. Of course, the effect on the gene pool will be minimal regardless. There are lots of things a person could do that would have a much more significant benefit to the human race than reducing the gene pool by .0000000164%.
And if this person does reproduce and raise his children to adulthood, then he doesn’t really have “bad genes” from an evolutionary perspective.
That’s only a small piece of the pie. In fact, natural selection isn’t enough to explain evolutionary theory.
On edit, I guess I should explicitly indicate that the changes don’t happen without mutations occurring, first. That’s evolution. I didn’t mean to imply creationism.
Oops. Wrong thread.
Enumerable, perhaps, but still not measurable. Very large populations will necessarily have a damping effect on any single individual’s contribution to the genetic makeup of a species. The vast majority of those genes are already present in some form anyway, in other individuals.
Besides which, there really is no meaningful way to measure such things as “one’s contribution to the gene pool” anyway; such a phrase is more rhetoric than anything else.
The problem with “evolutionary perspectives” is that we can only have such in retrospect. All of our ancestors were successful, certainly, but we can say little about our evolutionary legacy looking forward. My parents reproduced, but if I fail to, then they are failures as well, in an evolutionary sense (and maybe even in other senses…).
Our genes have been selected to prefer combining with those with the best chance of producing offspring to successfully reproduce. Men, whose sperm is cheap, will spread them everywhere. Females, who have to carry a baby, are going to be more selective. Males might well select females with higher chances of selective reproduction also.
I’m talking about all species here, not just us. And of course evolution doesn’t care about anything - those genes tending to be more successful at reproducing reproduce more successfully.
For people, you should look back in history about what is considered as good looks. That changes with fashion. I’ve read something about how recently like intelligence has been attracted to like intelligence, which has not always been the case for men in the past, I’m sorry to say.