[ol]
[li]in the context of the viral internet rumor mill, can be compared to the mythologies of old, in regards to influence on the world populace.[/li][li]push the envelope of the “collective unconconsious”, IMHO best presented by Joseph Campbell, paraphrased here[/li]
[li]provide crucial exposure to what a human is capable of surviving, thereby increasing the chances of each other individual in the rest of the population being able to survive in extreme circumstances.[/li][/ol]
Further, each of us has a equipotent background chance of becoming that person faced with the endeavor of hacking off a limb in order to survive. While more adventurous folks, living more “extreme” lifestyles, add a few points to that chance percentage.
Jocks have more sex than nerds, and frequently, more unprotected sex, with more people. Thus, their chances of spreading their seed while hanging out at the beach half naked playing volleyball are greater than someone who spends all day reading about political theory and posting on debate message boards. QED.
Extreme circumstances (such as those in which one finds it necessary to gnaw one’s own leg off to escape a bear trap…) are, by their very nature, rare.
There is no real reproductive advantage bestowed upon those who are more willing to gnaw their own legs off when they do find themselves caught within a bear trap. Unless it can be shown that, as a rule, such individuals find it easier to procure mates than does the general population.
The ability to actually survive gnawing one’s own leg off when one finds oneself caught within a bear trap is at least as dependent on non-genetic (and therefore, non-heritable) factors - such as simply having sufficient “know-how” to survive such situations (e.g., being able to tie a tourniquet, given the situation) - as genetic factors (not being prone to excessive blood loss, having a sufficient immune system to combat any potential infection, etc.). Said ability can also be largely dependent on the materials one has at hand (such as a pocketknife, or having a convenient fishing kit, per the examples in the linked article).
Point #3 essentially translates to intelligence being a major factor in survival in extreme situations. However, intelligence is already a dominant theme in human evolution, and is thus not limited to those extreme situations.
Point #2 rules out such instances as having any significant selective effect. If a reproductive advantage is not present, natural selection is most likely not at work. If natural selection is not at work, then such instances are not primary drivers of evolution change (natural selection is the primary driver of evolutionary change). It may be advantageous to the individual’s survival to be willing to gnaw one’s own leg off when caught in a bear trap, but survival alone does not tranlsate into evolutionary success.
Point #1 essentially relegates such instances to the fringes. Populational changes, however, are not driven by what happens at those statistical fringes. They are driven by selective pressures which influence the bulk of the population.
And, a bonus point is that human mating habits and preferences are so varied and eclectic that ultimately genetics tend to count for very little in determining who passes on their genes to future generations (these days, anyway). Some folks are attracted to thrill-seekers, others aren’t. Sexual selection, in my own humble opinion, plays a much more dominant role in our future right now than does natural selection.
Conclusion: Risk takers and adrenaline junkies play no major role in determining the evolutionary path of humans, and thus provide no evolutionary beneift to the species in and of themselves.
As a rule, such individuals certainly find it easier to procure mates than does the general dead population, who weren’t willing to gnaw their own legs off. But you’re saying that the low percentage of the population who actually experience this selective pressure, makes the the effect negligible?
But there’s more to it than that.
The fringes and bleeding edges are required in order to expand into new environments. Lots of evolutionary pressures that impacted those who came before us no longer apply to the general populace, but that doesn’t degrade the impact those pressures had when the were a signifigant variable.
The folks who pushed the envelope and survived in our evolutionary past were the folks who contributed to endeavors such as crossing the Berring Straight. They passed their survival experiences onto others. The farther those experiences traveled, the more they were repeated and shared, the greater the impact on the general populace, even so far as to contribute to the collective unconscious.
I did include the word “volley,” and surely you got my point - adventurous, active, strong, supple, and otherwise prime specimens achieve better odds of reproduction than sickly nerds who can’t go outside without taking my allergy med- er, wait…
I would further point out that “adrenaline junkies” tend to be the followers in society, not the leaders. What effect this has is something you are free to debate. For instance, wealthier people, in general, produce fewer children. On the other hand, they are healthier.
That was actually a reference to the fact that I meant to post this in IMHO. I would have brought more cites to GD. Not a whiney call to the refs, other than for a possible move.
The dead population has little bearing on the direction evolution takes with repsect to the surviving population. The question is not how well folks who are willing to gnaw their limbs off perform relative to the folks who didn’t and died, but relative to the rest of the living population. Seeing as how that’s who they have to compete with for mates and all. If “willingness to gnaw off limbs” yields a reproductive advantage over the rest of the folks (a good portion of whom, let us assume, prefer not to put themselves into situations where the gnawing of limbs might become necessary in the first place), then you might have a point. If, however, the rest of the folks are out reproducing whilst the adrenaline junkies are gnawing off their limbs, well…
The fringes are those who are either able to exploit new niches, or who are unable to compete with their conspecifics, or are otherwise forced into new niches. That assumes, of course, that there are niches to exploit. I don’t see the “gnawing off limbs” niche being a favorable one to exploit, so I don’t see these particular fringe elements becoming commonplace.
Besides which, in the scenario in which the fringes do find an exploitable niche to take advantage of, they tend to break away from the parent population and thus begin the road toward speciation. In such a case, they do not provide evolutionary benefit to the parent population, but rather serve to further their own population. In which case, adrenaline junkies may serve to provide an evolutionary benefit to other adrenaline junkies, but not to the rest of humanity as a whole.
And, besides which again, I would say that adrenaline junkies do play a major role in our social evolution. Where would we be today if no one was ever willing to try to break the sound barrier, for example?
And besides which yet again, the reason rare happenstances don’t affect evolution much in the first place is because they simply don’t happen often enough to constitute a selective pressure. A population simply cannot adapt to the occassional instance of being in the wrong place at the wrong time, and also happening to have the right equipment necessary to hack off a pinned limb. Perhaps if such occurances began to be commonplace, and those with, say, weaker ligaments and tendons were better able to extricate themselves, we might eventually evolve break-away arms and legs (much like a lizard’s tail). But, just as a single individual with a beneficial mutation is unlikely to have any evolutionary effect on a large population, a few individuals willing to gnaw their limbs off will likewise have little effect, given the statistical unlikelihood of needing to gnaw one’s limbs off in the first place. Even if most of the population was willing, but very few had the opportunity, such a trait would still be, in the long run, selectively neutral because it doesn’t have the chance to manifest often enough.
“Collective unconscious” is a social evolution concept, not a biological one. And “pass[ing] on their survival experiences onto others” has already been covered by noting that intelligence in general (which would include the ability to figure out ways to survive, as well as being able to learn such tricks from others) is already being (or used to be, at any rate) selected for within the general poulation, not just the fringes. That is, any individual who was able to learn how to make a better spear, or how to better hunt wildebeest, or whatever, would have had an advantage. One didn’t have to wrestle sabre-toothed cats in order to further one’s bloodline; one just needed to know enough to stay away from those sabre-teeth. “Good enough” is…, er, good enough…to ensure evolutionary success.
What if I further qualified my OP by limiting this particular advantage to human evolution? I’m still leaning toward the idea that our “success” (or failure, depending on your world view) as a species can be attributed, in part, to those bleeding edge folks who first wandered off and decided to cross that glacier, or climb that mountain, or launch that <insert your favorite early sea-going vessel here>.
Since the collective unconscious is an arguably human characteristic, I should have better qualified the human skew to my OP.
I get what you’re saying though, Darwin’s Finch…that it isn’t the adventurous risk-taker alone who advances the species into a new environment, but rather the intelligence of those who don’t necessarily put themselves at risk learning from that risk-takers experiences and applying that knowlege to the benefit of the greater population.
I suppose my question is, would the population have been able to make the intellectual/behavioral strides that got them across that glacier, without the daredevils who first gave it a go?
