It really hasn’t. I’m a huge fan of George Carlin, but he was not right about everything.
Noted. But, at the risk being literal minded, where did I say or even imply, “how 'bout it?” Just askin’.
Aloha
Oh, I understand it well enough. And you’re right, I’ve nearly died laughing.
Aloha
It’s also worth noting that evolution is a long, slow process. Maybe it’s true, right now, that the less educated and/or the less intelligent have more offspring who reach adulthood. But that hasn’t always been the case, and it won’t always be the case. The time period when that’s true might well end up being as short as a few centuries. That’s a short time for evolution of any species, and especially so for a species with generations as long as humanity’s.
And that brings us right back around to the main point the OP seems to be uninformed about evolution, that there’s no end “goal” to evolution nor is the improvement of certain traits like intelligence or strength necessarily a good thing for the survival of a species.
If lower average intelligence than the 2013 human norm is more beneficial for our species’ reproductive success, well, there you have it.
That’s the nice thing about “traditional markers”. They’re only traditional as long as they are useful to the author. I’m sure having passenger pigeon genes were a great set of “traditional markers” correlated highly with reproductive success for thousands of years. But things clearly change and can change quickly.
How about a cite? As honest Abe put it, God must love the poor. He’s made so many of them. This has also been said about insects. 
Aloha
Most of the folks who use the word “Darwinism” are Creationists. Or Intelligent Designers…
Do you understand the difference between intelligence and education? Because it seems neither you nor the person you are quoting here does. And this Last person obviously doesn’t understand what Darwinism is, since at it’s heart it’s about successful reproduction strategies, which would mean that this would be a case of pure Darwinism, since it sounds to me like poor women are more successful at reproducing that middle or upper class women.
I think the main problem here is you really don’t understand Evolution and you think that today is ‘shit’ while in the past was some sort of golden age, and you are erroneously trying to couple your mis-understanding with your filtered view and draw some sort of conclusion out of the two. Sort of a shit in, shit out situation, unfortunately where you arrive at your pre-selected conclusion using false data and ignorance to get there.
The other thing the OP is missing is that even if it were true that the less intelligent are having more babies, they are not competing for resources with the more intelligent, and so those “intelligence genes” are not being destroyed. They’re all still there, and come the zombie apocalypse when the smart folks have a survival advantage, we still have plenty of those genes floating around in the gene pool.
I post that somewhat tongue in cheek, but it’s actually true. It’s like the folks who think blue eyes are going to disappear in the US because so many people with brown eyes are immigrating here. We had a thread not that long ago where it was impossible to convince this one poster that he was wrong on that point.
But when it comes down to it, ideas like those posted in the OP are simply an ignorant way of trying to use science to back up one own personal political or social views. It’s simply wrong, and it’s not science at all.
Why do you refer to “Darwinism” instead of evolution? Are you by any chance against the teaching of evolution?
“Reverse Darwinism” is a nonsensical, meaningless phrase. It implies that there is a “correct” direction for evolution, and therefore we can also move “backwards”, in the “wrong” direction. It also uses “Darwinism” in place of “evolution”, which is stupid, but whatever. The main point is that there is NO direction in evolution. This notion that life has been a long chain of inevitable Progress, leading to us, the pinnacle and crowning achievement, is pure poppycock. Our particular ancestors happened across intelligence as a survival strategy, and it’s worked out pretty well for us so far. But millions of other species have happened upon millions of other strategies that all worked, more or less equally well, for them. There’s nothing special about our particular set of adaptations that makes us different or better than other creatures.
If we are evolving away from intelligence (and I’m far from admitting that to be true), then all that means is that the less intelligent have a survival and reproductive advantage. That’s is. The one thing we can be sure of is that if our descendents survive, they will eventually be different from us. They might be smarter, they might be dumber, they might turn into sessile lumps. There’s no moral right or wrong from an evolutionary perspective. If they survive, they survive. Nothing else matters.
Finally, I’ll just point out that it’s beyond silly to pretend that we can see evolutionary changes in human intelligence over recorded history. If you start with the Greeks or Egyptians, there’s still nowhere NEAR enough time for significant changes in human intelligence to have spread throughout the population. And if someone claims that our generation has “evolved” away from their parents’ or grandparents’ generation, all that proves is that they don’t have the tiniest bit of a clue about how evolution actually works.
Because I like it, and because it’s relevant to the thread:
[QUOTE=Neal Stephenson in Cryptonomicon]
Like every other creature on the face of the earth, Godfrey was, by birthright, a stupendous badass, albeit in the somewhat narrow technical sense that he could trace his ancestry back up a long line of slightly less highly evolved stupendous badasses to that first self-replicating gizmo—which, given the number and variety of its descendants, might justifiably be described as the most stupendous badass of all time. Everyone and everything that wasn’t a stupendous badass was dead.
[/quote]
In a real (but somewhat nebulous) sense, the lowliest cockroach or amoeba or whale or human being are all equally evolved. And all stupendous badasses as the result of billions of years of selection.
There’s another theory out there that once we humans started to gain artificial control of our own reproduction and other aspects of our health and longevity, Darwin’s theory no longer applies. For instance, many people who would not have survived “naturally” long enough to produce offspring because of accident or illness now have the chance to reproduce because society helps them survive. And many other perfectly healthy people choose not to reproduce for their own reasons, in large part because we can now separate sex from reproduction.
I’m not quite sure how this fits in with the OP, but it seems relevant. If natural selection is being relaced by artificial selection in our species, how relevant is Darwin?
I’d like to see some stats/studies/cites on this “theory” before commenting on it. It seems that we haven’t been here long enough to make such an observation, but I may be wrong.
Well, it doesn’t replace it. And there are plenty of social species which help the less fit to survive-- individuals who wouldn’t survive on their own. Just look at a herd of musk ox “circling the wagons” to protect the vulnerable young from predators. We just do it a bit better.
But make no mistake-- evolution still applies to us. It’s just that things are a bit different when you such a large population as ours, spread out over so many different environments. We’ll see evolution in play when the next comet hits, though. Or the next plague or whatever.
Actually, I have to agree that ‘theory’ is too strong a term. There is also a question of whether adequate health care and access to birth control is wide-spread enough to make a net difference in the species reproduction. My guess is that there would be no measureable change yet, nor can I really imagine how such a change could BE measured.
Still, it’s plausible enough to kick around the idea.
The numbers of people who are able to survive long enough to reproduce today but wouldn’t have in the past are so small that it’s not going to have any great impact. And there have always been population of otherwise healthy humans who never reproduced for one reason or another, so again I’m not seeing that as having a huge impact either. Even if in the future we can fully manipulate and control our genetics we’ll see be impacted by evolution, since it will be our own cultural and social outlook and viewpoint that will be influencing HOW and WHY we manipulate and change the species.
What is your interpretation of the cartoon, then? What do you think the intended massage of the cartoonist was? How does your own behavior accord with the message of the cartoonist, if at all?
The important thing to remember about natural and/or sexual selection, which is what you seem to be talking about, is that the ONLY winning criteria is leaving behind descendants. It’s not about what we, as humans, value socially, it’s all about successful reproduction.
By that definition, the rapidly reproducing poor actually ARE more fit than the slowly/less reproducing rich.
Social Darwinism is a different thing than actual Darwinism. It has to do to with status, classism, and human values and not “natural” values.
The other thing to remember is that there are two basic reproductive strategies: first, you have LOTS of kids and hope one or two survive, and is typically found where parents either won’t or simply can’t provide a lot of resources to each individual offspring. The other strategy is to have fewer offspring, but lavish resources on each one to maximize the chances of individuals surviving long enough to reproduce.
Humans, being complicated, tend to slide a bit back and forth on that scale, but as a general rule those with fewer resources (a.k.a. “the poor”) tend towards the first strategy and those with more resources tend towards the second. This is not fixed, though - which is why, when prosperity, education, and healthcare increase human reproduction tends to go down, as the parents can afford to lavish more resources on fewer offspring.
So, it’s not inherently bad that the poor reproduce more than the wealthy because they’re all human beings. What is bad are social constraints that prevent the poor from becoming less poor/better educated/healthier. THAT’s what really perpetrates ignorance, poor health, and early death.
Of course it still applies. All we’ve done is change the strength of various selective pressures, reducing many of them down to near zero. We’ve changed the environment in which we find ourselves, which is what determines selection, but that doesn’t meant that evolution suddenly just stops.