[MF_Kitten]

i remember there were some norwegian journalists or something a while ago that were being held hostage in the middle east (i think) by some muslim extremists, and the journalist guys just lied and said they weren´t christian, and just denied their faith altogether to be set free. they got to live.

the christian communities in norway were pissed at them for denying christ and the lord to get to live. i guess that´s the catch of religion, eh? if someone wants to kill you for your religion, you just kinda have to escape on your own or submit defeat.

and yeah, human bodies are crap! i´m guessing it might have to do with us not needing our physical traits to survive anymore, since our minds are dominant instead. we just use our intelligence to get through life, instead of having to survive stuff by killing something or running or whatever. why would our bodies keep evolving if there is no "survival of the fittest" in humans anymore, but rather "survival of the smartest"? physical traits have (almost) no impact on our ability to survive and pass on our genes anymore.

i´m guessing that´s why, it kinda seems to make sense, dunnit?

[liquidcow]

Originally Posted by MF_Kitten

and yeah, human bodies are crap! i´m guessing it might have to do with us not needing our physical traits to survive anymore, since our minds are dominant instead. we just use our intelligence to get through life, instead of having to survive stuff by killing something or running or whatever. why would our bodies keep evolving if there is no "survival of the fittest" in humans anymore, but rather "survival of the smartest"? physical traits have (almost) no impact on our ability to survive and pass on our genes anymore.

i´m guessing that´s why, it kinda seems to make sense, dunnit?

Well we do need physical traits to a large extent as in we need to be able to keep ourselves alive and not get ill and so on. The main reason animals are clearly not 'designed' and are full of weird flaws are that evolution means having to add or make an alteration to something that already exists, rather than going back to the drawing board and starting from scratch. Hence, in the eye for example, the light sensitive cells are actually behind the nerves, which then have to travel back through the retina in order to get to the brain, resulting in the blind spot. Surely no sane designer would do that, obviously somewhere way back in one of our common ancestors, those light sensitive cells developed behind those nerves (or something like that), and the rest developed from there. Animal bodies (not just humans) are full of things like that.

[Varcolac]

There's always the prostate gland argument as well: what kind of designer would put an amusement arcade in the middle of a sewage system?

[Scar Symmetry]

Originally Posted by MF_Kitten

i remember there were some norwegian journalists or something a while ago that were being held hostage in the middle east (i think) by some muslim extremists, and the journalist guys just lied and said they weren´t christian, and just denied their faith altogether to be set free. they got to live.

the christian communities in norway were pissed at them for denying christ and the lord to get to live. i guess that´s the catch of religion, eh? if someone wants to kill you for your religion, you just kinda have to escape on your own or submit defeat.

Right... so they would say the greatest gift is life, which was given to them by God, but you should sooner forfeit this gift than briefly deny your belief in him to keep it?

What a load of fucking dogshit.

[Adam Of Angels]

Yeah, agreed, Dave, but you shouldn't waste your breath. That sort of logic is obviously not very developed and shouldn't be seriously considered in an intellectual manner.

[JBroll]

Precisely what are you thinking when you call it 'logic'?

Jeff

[Adam Of Angels]

Originally Posted by Adam Of Angels

Yeah, agreed, Dave, but you shouldn't waste your breath. That sort of nonsense is obviously not very developed and shouldn't be seriously considered in an intellectual manner.

Fixed.

It is a lot more accurate that way.

[JBroll]

Much better, I was wondering if we were all talking about the same thing.

Jeff

[Scar Symmetry]

I was calling it dogshit, I dunno about you guys

[Adam Of Angels]

Dog shit can be analyzed, which can provide useful information at least SOME times.

[Xanithon]

There currently aren't any selection pressures upon us as humans because we can go through a range of different climates and still survive - our evolution would now be 'cultural' or 'Surivival of the Smartest' (that MF_Kitten said above) and not necessarily physical evolution - I watched a seminar (for Scholarship Biology, from which I pulled out from) about future physical evolution of us, and one thing I remember them noting; women who are larger will be selected for, as they can produce more offspring with the largest survival rate - and there is less effort in doing so as their pelvis will be larger (with a larger hole) so babies would be born easier. I don't remember much else other than that point sadly.

BUUUUUUUT for other animals, there will still be selection pressure acting upon them because they cannot change environment, unlike us. Evolution WILL be observable in the next... 100KY to 1MY? All we have to hope for is that the next meteor won't be devastating .

BTW Thanks IamOthello - i'm going to check out his new book.

[JBroll]

If I'm not mistaken, we have seen evolution in humans very recently. Outside humans it is usually observed very easily - anything from bacteria to fruit flies, with a short reproduction period, can be seen nicely.

Jeff

[silentrage]

^ That's what I thought until I saw this.
Human Evolution: Are Humans Still Evolving? - Yahoo! News

[JBroll]

... that article is about evolution occuring today. What do you mean 'until'?

Jeff

[silentrage]

It's a response to this.

Originally Posted by Xanithon

There currently aren't any selection pressures upon us as humans because we can go through a range of different climates and still survive - our evolution would now be 'cultural' or 'Surivival of the Smartest' (that MF_Kitten said above) and not necessarily physical evolution - I watched a seminar (for Scholarship Biology, from which I pulled out from) about future physical evolution of us, and one thing I remember them noting; women who are larger will be selected for, as they can produce more offspring with the largest survival rate - and there is less effort in doing so as their pelvis will be larger (with a larger hole) so babies would be born easier. I don't remember much else other than that point sadly.

BUUUUUUUT for other animals, there will still be selection pressure acting upon them because they cannot change environment, unlike us. Evolution WILL be observable in the next... 100KY to 1MY? All we have to hope for is that the next meteor won't be devastating .

BTW Thanks IamOthello - i'm going to check out his new book.

[JBroll]

Oh, okay... fair enough, then.

Jeff

[Xanithon]

I didn't mean to come across as saying "EVOLUTION IS NOT OCCURING TO US HUMANS NOWZOR!" but rather that Natural Selection doesn't have the same effect on as as it does on animals in the wild as we can change our environment etc,

I found something which supports the statement I made before:

Douglas Ewbank, a demographer at the University of Pennsylvania who undertook the statistical analysis for the study, which was published Oct. 21 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), says that because cultural factors tend to have a much more prominent impact than natural selection in the shaping of future generations, people tend to write off the effect of evolution. "Those changes we predict for 2409 could be wiped out by something as simple as a new school-lunch program. But whatever happens, it's likely that in 2409, Framingham women will be 2 cm shorter and 1 kg heavier than they would have been without natural selection. Evolution is a very slow process. We don't see it if we look at our grandparents, but it's there."

[silentrage]

Oh yeah, that makes more sense then.

[liquidcow]

Originally Posted by Xanithon

There currently aren't any selection pressures upon us as humans because we can go through a range of different climates and still survive - our evolution would now be 'cultural' or 'Surivival of the Smartest' (that MF_Kitten said above) and not necessarily physical evolution - I watched a seminar (for Scholarship Biology, from which I pulled out from) about future physical evolution of us, and one thing I remember them noting; women who are larger will be selected for, as they can produce more offspring with the largest survival rate - and there is less effort in doing so as their pelvis will be larger (with a larger hole) so babies would be born easier. I don't remember much else other than that point sadly.

It's a tricky issue looking at how people have 'evolved' in recent centuries, since some changes might be more cultural or social rather than genetic. The fact that people seem to be taller now than they used to, for example, could be down to the availability of better nutrition.

I'm not so sure about the 'survival of the smartest' idea. It's totally possible that something like that could happen hypothetically, but I don't think smart people are actually better at reproducing (or, to be more accurate, producing fertile offspring, which is the real issue, not simply reproducing) than dumb people. Actually, dumb people are probably a lot better, as attested by the Jeremy Kyle Show. Watch the beginning of a movie called Idiocracy (don't bother with the rest unless you're really bored), even though it's a joke it's making a pretty good point, albeit an exaggerated one. The thing with evolution is that it's not working in one particular direction, and it doesn't necessarily 'improve' things (in the sense that we might think of something 'improving'). We could evolve to become dumber if it were actually a survival advantage to do so. Creatures do evolve in such a way that they lose things, like eyes, if they don't need them...

[JBroll]

The intro to Idiocracy is not based on anything remotely approaching fact. The important stuff is the rest of the movie, but I guess it's not that important 'unless you're really bored'...

Jeff

[Adam Of Angels]

"...thought you'd have bigger hair."

[Underworld]

The evolution human being is forced to now is quite different than physical evolution we had passed through. It is in a more psychological and social way. For example, people now have way more stress to deal with, they have to give their best at work, with the family, with their wife/husband (sexual performance). Humans had to fit into the new level of performance in every spheres of society. There are fewer and fewer "mothers at home" to take care of the kids, so both parents have to fullfil this "charge", as well as to work in an always faster world. That's why now there are so many depressive people and also why the legal drug market is worth 600G$ a year in the united states (including 100G$ of psychoactives drugs).

"This is a tremendous work of social adaptation, put into someone's responsability to socialise themselves and take responsability of themselves (no religion to explain their acts or tell them how to act, etc.)." [traduction from an article written by Marcelo Otero, Sociology teacher at University of Montreal]

[hairychris]

I would cite the source (I have it at home... somewhere... I've just moved so all's in chaos!) but an interesting potential issue is that our use of technology in allowing us to live together the way that we do has essentially outflanked us on an evolutionary level.

We evolved to live in small bands, or tribes, of mainly related individuals. The last 11,000 years of technological development - agriculture, domestication of animals, static population in settlements - has been significantly faster then our evolutionary ability to keep up.

We're still tribal animals at heart. We can deal with 100 neighbours/friends/colleagues, 1000 and we've started losing it, millions... well we have little ability to actually comprehend these numbers on a meaningful level. Why do we find our own 'tribes', when such behaviour is ultimately devisive?

The quote attributed to Stalin (IIRC - although he may not have said it even if I do get the source right!) which says that "one death is a tragedy wheras a million deaths is a statistic" illustrates this too well.

[silentrage]

While I find your idea both interesting and plausible, I still think the fact we're all still alive is evidence that our evolution is way ahead of ourselves, and the key being our highly developed brain (relatively speaking of course) that is able to handle the living environment we've created.

I'm sure if someone tried to be emotionally or psychologically connected to more than a 1000 others, mental breakdown and batshit insanity would occur, but it seems no one needs to in order to survive in modern society. I only have about a handful of what I call friends and I get along just fine, IMO at least. :p

[liquidcow]

Originally Posted by JBroll

The intro to Idiocracy is not based on anything remotely approaching fact. The important stuff is the rest of the movie, but I guess it's not that important 'unless you're really bored'...

Jeff

I take it to be making the point - which is a fact - that something which we as humans consider 'better' - such as intelligence - isn't always the direction in which something is going to evolve if it doesn't result in those genes surviving. In physical terms you have animals that have evolved out of having eyes because they don't need them - they have the remains of eyes so they must have once had them but lost them - so having something we would think is 'better' is obviously not an advantage to them. Maybe that's not the intended point but that's how I took it.

Originally Posted by Underworld

The evolution human being is forced to now is quite different than physical evolution we had passed through. It is in a more psychological and social way. For example, people now have way more stress to deal with, they have to give their best at work, with the family, with their wife/husband (sexual performance). Humans had to fit into the new level of performance in every spheres of society. There are fewer and fewer "mothers at home" to take care of the kids, so both parents have to fullfil this "charge", as well as to work in an always faster world. That's why now there are so many depressive people and also why the legal drug market is worth 600G$ a year in the united states (including 100G$ of psychoactives drugs).

"This is a tremendous work of social adaptation, put into someone's responsability to socialise themselves and take responsability of themselves (no religion to explain their acts or tell them how to act, etc.)." [traduction from an article written by Marcelo Otero, Sociology teacher at University of Montreal]

That's not evolution in the genetic sense, it's just people adapting their behaviour to their surroundings or being affected by their upbringing and experiences. I guess it's the old nature/nurture thing.