Better? As Homo Sapiens?
No.
These sorts of changes aren’t genetic, though, they are either cultural or personal. That the culture has been improving is starkly obvious; but individual self-improvement is largely irrelevent because it is lost on death. And nothing a person can do based on will or desire can make the species better genetically.
I see no reason to accept your assertion. Why can’t it be genetic that people are becoming better? If you’re willing to name any behavior moral, I see nothing to preclude that same behavior from being selected over generations.
Mostly because there are much better alternate explanations for pretty much all the discernable improvements in human behavior. Okay, sure, perhaps the decrease in tendency to slaughter the entire neighboring tribe and salt their fields is only 99.9% caused by societal development, with an entirely unverifiable 0.1% change that is theoretically traceable to genetics. But that’s like trying to blame continental drift on tidal forces - okay there may be an effect, but come on folks, plate tectonics is where it’s really at.
By the way, what are the supposed selection pressures for being ‘nice’ or whatever, anyway?
If you are nice to your family/tribe, and the other members are nice to you, then members of your family/tribe will do better than you would if you are not being nice to each other. It much the same reason that good parenting is encouraged by natural selection: if fathers and mothers look after their offspring, then their genes will survive in their offspring.
Sure, but that has been with us for a LONG time. Probably since we started walking upright. The thing is, why should you feel that way to folks OUTSIDE of your family/tribe? For a long time we didn’t have that. Now we do. And the time frame has been too short for this to have been a biological (as opposed to social) change in our make up. Only a few thousand years…and really, less than a hundred for major changes in how we humans look at those outside our own family/tribe/city/state/country, and how our attitudes towards them have changed.
Look at the progression for how wars were fought in this century alone, on what was acceptable losses and acceptable civilian targeting and causalities. We have changed a LOT in the last 2000-4000 years…and probably changed nearly as much in the last hundred as in the previous 4000.
-XT
Well, see, there’s another assertion I’m not prepared to accept - that the timeframe has been too short for it to have been biological. A lot of scientists think evolution works a lot faster than we used to think. Some scientists think that human brains have even changed in the last several hundred years, as moving from agrarian professions to mentally demanding ones favors intelligence more than before.
One of the leading theories about changing from hunter/gatherers to settlers who could engage in large economies is that *genetic *changes occurred that allowed unrelated people to trust each other, and resulted in a very successful strategic shift.
Basically, a hypothesized ‘religion’ gene. For instance, other animals don’t have a concept of stealing being wrong - they don’t recognize ownership. For instance 2, primitive humans probably didn’t trust anybody else outside family, but now that there’s a belief in an invisible spirit watching everything everyone does, well, it seems a lot safer to interact with others - to at least *try *it.
I lay 99.9 to 0.1 odds that what actually happened was an expansion (in many places) of the set of groups defined as the ‘tribe’. In cases where this has not happened, emnities continue to run high.
And I have serious doubt in the existence of a ‘religion gene’ - if it exists, wherefor atheism?
As noted I’m hard pressed to think of anything where genetics might be an explanation where there isn’t some obvious other reason for the phenomena - which makes your argument look like a “gene of the gaps” approach. Can you name any aspect of societal improvement that can not be explained by a simple societal-development explanation?
If you define how we test that, I’ll take those odds. But it’s beside the point - ‘tribe’ already presumes unrelated males living together.
Perhaps - give me a better definition of ‘societal improvement.’ But perhaps not, because your definition of societal improvement might be explainable by societal-development by definition.
At any rate, it strikes me as the wrong question. If somebody does identify a gene that explains the behavior, even if societal-development could explain it, it shouldn’t be the default explanation.
There are some traits of humans that have clearly been changed by evolution in the last several thousand years - lactose tolerance where cattle were domesticated, skin color varying based on relative sunlight, etc. Would you agree there’s no societal-developmental explanation for these?
Evolutionary pressure can explain some things, why not others?
When we move to the area of behavior, should we preclude an evolutionary adaptation just because another explanation exists?
I don’t know why, but not long ago I happened to think of the Cain and Abel story, specifically the part where Cain, having just confessed, more or less, to the murder, and therefore told that he is condemned to wander the Earth. He complains, “But anyone who finds me will kill me!”–“Not so”, says the big guy…you know the rest. What startled me was the realization that this story probably goes back to very primitive times when there was no law as such. If someone was guilty, or you thought he was guilty, you could kill him. I think also the story was an attempt to explain the origin of law and justice as things which needed to be separated out from the emotions of people.
It is difficult to say yes, or no. In some ways yes, in some ways no. Some things are better, some worse, as an example: I remember living in Chicago and didn’t even lock our door (1950’s), now one has to lock up every thing cars etc. I could ride the el or subway at midnight and feel safe…I wouldn’t now.
Then there were less people, news was slower. We didn’t know what was going on even in the next town so if there was crime etc. we didn’t hear about it, Now we get the news from all over the world. But I often wonder if the percentage of people are just as good (or bad) as they were then.
History seems to bear out the fact that man’s inner self is about the same. I think society has made it easier to accept things that were considered wrong in years past and some things that were accepted are not accepted now.