Painful birth doesn’t discourage overpopulation.
And if you mean painful ovulation…I think all that will discourage is continued living.
The whole aggression thing is interesting.
A certain amount of aggression was useful in our prehistory. If you take it away and change nothing else, I think it would be selected for and gradually return.
I think it would be useful to weaken our tribal instincts somehow. So even if as individuals we still have aggression the idea of hundreds of “us” fighting hundreds of “them” seems as weird to us as it should.
I want webbed hands and feet, if even slightly. Some type of “natural” calluses or ridges on the hands and feet for better gripping and durability (hobbit feet, why not?). Just for giggles, a wider possible variety in eye and hair color: your kids might have purple eyes!
Yes. that’s inaccurate and it’s a slander against men. It’s nothing more than a way of calling men evil.
As for violent women; women are just as likely to engage in domestic violence as men, just as likely to order violence done as men, and more likely than men to abuse, torture and kill children.
Women don’t have nearly the sex drive that men do, and are generally inclined to let men initiate sex (to such a degree that lesbians often report problems with sexual frustration because both partners feel uncomfortable starting things). And female-on-male rape is significantly harder to boot. So of course they don’t rape very often; they’d be putting in more effort for something they don’t care as much about and aren’t inclined to do in the first place. As for other violent crime; women are less likely to be investigated, arrested or convicted which skews the statistics, as well as being more risk-averse.
And none of this matters much since you made it clear with your talk about millions of deaths in the 20th century that you were talking about war and political massacres; not street crime.
Irrelevant; a willingness to use a weapon for any reason is a violent impulse. The same violent impulses that you have condemned as evil.
That’s ridiculous. All violent aggression requires is that you want to do something someone else doesn’t want and don’t care if you harm them in the process. It doesn’t require a “penchant for violence”; someone can order the death of millions without having any “penchant for violence”. It just requires that they want something done and don’t care how.
Because people would be screaming about how sexist and bigoted against women it is. But of course it’s perfectly OK to portray men as demonic monsters and the source of all evil.
Perhaps switch the “Us” and “Them” switch so it is at default set to “Us”. You don’t want to eliminate it - you just want a better reason for putting someone into the “Them” category beyond that they live in the next village.
One issue with changing our appearance is that you increase the apparent gap between humans and animals and throw in features that might be difficult to explain from just natural selection. I wouldn’t want to do anything which could potentially affect scientific progress later, no matter how minor the hindrance…
Adding a fourth kind of colour receptor to the eye might help us to appear more varied but doesn’t have the same issues (we won’t realize our vision is different until much later, and we have an ancestor that had four types of cone anyway).
Well to be fair, in this scenario anyone who suspects that humans are the result of a design process and not just evolution is actually right. So in fact you aren’t necessarily hurting science at all; although ideally you’d scatter some long lasting evidence of high technology around to give ammunition to the people who’ll argue for a non-magical source of the modifications. Say a large, obvious monolith on the Moon with a series of carved pictures showing humans being modified from the old version to the new one.
I realized that in this scenario ID would actually be partially right.
So you wouldn’t be making them believe falsehoods, but you’d still be distracting or even confounding evolutionary models.
It’s rather like if every now and then you flew an airplane and threw a rock out of the window. The population might then believe that meteorites come from flying machines. And they’d be partially right.
But for genuine meteorites, the most reasonable hypothesis for them would be that they fall from machines too high to see, or otherwise invisible machines. It may take them much longer to seriously consider the hypothesis of meteorites coming from space.
This is merely a wordier rehash of your prior remarks which were empty
of content.
It occurs to me to add to what I have already said that the possibility of our
earlier extinction due to behavior modification may be dismissed as long as
we retained the overwhelming competitive advantage of our phenomenal intelligence.
Huh? “Evolve away with flaw”? What does that mean, and would a “backward toe”
be a flaw or not?
Unless I see something more worth replying to you may not hear from me again.
We may infer from this that men commit 90% of all murders.
No, the only men who are evil are those who yield to their impulses toward
unprovoked violent aggression. Unfortunately such men cause damage far
out of proportion to their numbers.
Bullshit to every one of your claims, and you are just making up shit
as you go along, aren’t you? I provided citation for my side of the
argument in the case of murder. Go ahead and look for supporting data
of your own, except leave out “order violence” by which I guess you
mean trivially contract killing and such. Good luck!
OK, that is a decent excuse for women, now how about a decent excuse
for the men??? Your point about women evades numerous no gray area facts:
rape is virtually a male perp-only crime, the genetic correlation is exact,
the crime is evil, and a strong sex drive is no excuse for committing it.
Now please give us an explanation for all other male-dominated violent crime:
murder, manslaughter, assault, and whatever else.
Of course you can fall back on the stupid assertion of yours that the male perps
were “ordered” or otherwise manipulated by some woman in the background,
but that won’t count in your favor without some evidence.
You imply that investigators are failing to consider evidence and probable
cause against women, and that they exhibit bias in favor of women which
allows numerous women to literally get away with murder. Citation please,
and good luck!
I did no such thing, and I had crime in mind to begin with, even if I did not
specify so by word.
Also, there are ~15,000 murders per year in the US alone. I expect worldwide
we are talking about at least 10x that number, which is a significant percentage
of the number who die as a result of political violence.
Oh really? So a woman who uses a weapon against a rapist is guilty
of the same evil the rapist is guilty of?
I think you had better make a retraction, and face the fact that defensive
violence is not the same as aggressive violence, and must be treated
much diferently.
Addressed.
Fact is never sexist or bigoted.
Some behavior IS monstrous, demonic, and evil, and men ARE more frequently
guilty of it than women. Smearing an airtight matter of fact as being sexist or
bigoted, as you do, is not amusing.
8000 years ago, obviously aberrant individuals would be killed at birth in significant numbers if born to “normal” parents, and small tribes of bird footed poisonous cat women would become targets of the entire human race, even if they were non-aggressive.
I think blood vessels behind the retina, and slight increases in both number and efficiency of mitochondria would be much more likely to make humans more survivable, and remain invisible to unaffected humans. A more facile immune response, with a maximum response limit to avoid cascade crisis would probably be beneficial, but unintended consequences are hard to predict. Not sure the genetic variations would spread to universal incidence in such a short time, either.
The matter of male aggression is somewhat more complicated than is being presented. High testosterone levels have a whole lot of effect on males, obviously, but that same thing also affects females, aside from being victims of aggression. High testosterone males are general preferred by females in mate selection. Such males are more likely to provide insemination and higher positions in social hierarchies as well. It is not likely that baseline female populations are going to be motivated to improve the chances of peace in the world. You can’t even get a teenaged girl to understand that the bad boy is going to beat you eventually. A silly thing like actual experience doesn’t seem to do it either.
Sure there would. I’m not talking about people getting pregnant by themselves.
Really? I mean, granted, things would be different… but you’re saying the world would come screeching to a halt if men could get pregnant? Somehow that strikes me as a bit chauvinistic.
But if men get pregnant they aren’t men anymore, and pretty soon won’t think like men; there will be strong evolutionary pressure to make them in essence women.
I believe that Acid Lamp is pointing out that if both genders have the same function there’s no reason for them to be different, and society becomes greatly simplified because there’s less variety. No men-and-women dynamic, just one gender and one basic viewpoint.
If 2 genders are good, would 3, 8 or Graham’s number genders be better?
Think of the “dynamic”!
I would agree with Cosmic Relief that with one gender things would certainly be different but not necessarily worse. In fact, there are several potential advantages: no gender to discriminate against, probably faster evolution as there’s only one set of requirements, more potential partners so you’re more likely to find someone ideal for you etc.
If there is no modification, the worst case scenario is 95% of the population dieing in a nuclear war, and the remaining 5% repopulating the planet. It would be hard humanity to wipe itself out, as area-of-effect weapons get diminishing returns when targeting sparser and sparser populations. Biological weapons become less effective when there are less people for the uninfected to bump into, and conventional warfare requires a industrial base, which would be hard to maintain in a very close total war.
In short, our aggression doesn’t threaten our survival.
If the modification occurs, potentially three things would occur.
[ul]
[li]Your best case scenario is correct, and humanity successfully developeds without the suffering caused by aggression.[/li][li]Your worst case scenario occurs, and humanity’s other advantages still allow us to survive. Maybe things end up better, maybe they are worse.[/li][li]My worst case scenario, reducing aggression is a crippling disadvantage which leads to humanity’s extinction.[/li][/ul]
Only one of the four outcomes is proven.
You are gambling the proven survival of humanity for a chance to make things better, but I hold humanity’s survival is too much to risk on a game of chance.
@Triskadecamus - Good point, I really should have worded the thread better. Let’s handwave it and have them treat their modified children like any other.
Nah. If everybody laid eggs as I suggested, but both sexes could lay them, then any so-called “pressures” would balance out. The sexes might become more culturally similar, I’ll grant that, but so what?
There’s no “reason” for most of what biology gave us. DNA mutations spat some things out, and they happened to work in the Pleistocene.
That’s absurd. Do you think every relationship on earth is predicated on heterosexual biology, and every viewpoint on earth is a factor of gender conflict? Perhaps sexual relations would become more straightforward, but our other interactions would become richer and more rewarding from not having to fight this endless stupid sex conflict anymore.
This idea intrigues me, though all the complex hermaphradites start as one gender and change to another gender later in life, so it’ll be safer to use this modification, as at least it is proven to work.
They would become psychologically identical because they’d be physically identical. You are essentially going along with the old sexist idea that “the solution to the problems of the world is to get rid of men”, although at least you aren’t calling them to literally be exterminated.
First, I never said anything about every relationship and viewpoint being based of gender and heterosexuality. But much of it is, and you are eliminating all of that by in effect eradicating men And it’s silly to think that you are going to make the human experience richer by cutting away half of it. And of course you are implying that men are utterly worthless, that we contribute nothing to the world; in fact, that we are a net negative.
I wouldn’t change a whole lot, at least cosmetically. I’d make us able to see in a wider range of light spectrum, like seeing UV and infrared. I’d make our immune systems able to process out toxins a lot better, and our metabolism process out excess salts. This means we could eat things that would be poisonous to other animals, meat that may have spoiled, and drink sea water.
Also, prehensile penises. OK maybe just one, but still prehensile.
It’s interesting that you’re parsing this as “getting rid of men”.
Why don’t you consider it getting rid of women? After all, every human would be capable of producing sperm and (without other changes in the hypothetical), would have a penis.
I’d say the most accurate analogy would be a merging of the genders.
ETA: Actually, Cosmic Relief’s hypothetical is a little confusing. I wouldn’t bet my life that I’ve parsed it right either. :smack:
I think (s)he means anyone can get anyone pregnant, and has just included two genders because of an (incorrect) assumption that two genders are required for sexual reproduction.
I have not argued that violence threatens the survival of the human race,
and my case does not depend on the existence of such a threat. Therefore
all you have said above is off-topic, and I do not wish to be drawn into a
diversion over it.
That does not mean I agree with your ludicrous suggestion that our chances
of survival are nothing to fret over even if 95% of us are incinerated in one fell
swoop of nuclear war, with biological war yet to come!
Sorry to keep having to say this, but you continue to do nothing except attach
bells and whistles to your original completely unsupported premise.
Until you offer some justice for your assumptions it is fair to consider the risk
imagined by them to be zero.
My premise, on the other hand, is supported by reasonable inference from the
facts of human existence. The 100s millions victims of 20th century violence
could not conceivably have been necessary for human survival. The same is true
working backwards century by century of recorded history. Nor has the study of
primitive people given evidence of any compensating value in violence.
History and anthropology provide justice for the assumption the same was true
during prehistory, namely, that we survived despite violence rather than because of it.
Now, unless you offer something new and novel I have had enough of you.
Well A merging of the genders would mean that we reproduce through hermaphroditic sexual reproduction, a bit like slugs. Since the new *unigender *is both male and female you would exchange genetic material with another person and both could become pregnant assuming they are in their fertile period of cycle. As far as I know, all animals that use this strategy have a uniform physical appearance and no dimorphism with individuals leaning more male or female. It is likely that such a modification would either be wildly successful if the humans could work together, or disastrous as much of the drive to impress come from a sexual dynamic of two genders.