Is man still evolving?

Originally posted by Good Wolf

But if/when he colonise the cosmos, I think well make ships perfectly suited to our physiology. We won't need to adapt.

Ah, but accidents happen, or things we didnt realize we needed to protect ourselves from will manifest. We really are quite careless, and incredibly poor planners in the long term.

I would love to have a glimpse at what the descendants of humans would look like 100,000 or more years in the future. (Assuming we do not go extinct before then) Whether we leave the Earth or not. I could imagine humans that moved out into space looking similar to the "greys" that people report. Of course that is pure fantasy, but amusing to contemplate.

Of course we're still evolving since our race is still "young". Of course we cannot notice it, but since evolution takes millenias or some million years, it will take a great amount of time to see a real change in our evolution.
BTW: I'm new here. Great to meet you!

reply to post by Illusionsaregrander


I had an idea a while ago that it would make more sense to colonise the ocean before space. I mean think of the real estate unused down there. It'd be cheaper to build under the ocean anyway.

Wither that or I'm insane.

reply to post by Good Wolf


No, I dont think you are insane.

I think it would be an excellent test of our capability to inhabit an "alien" environment with which to test our technology before moving further away from Earth.

reply to post by Nagas


Welcome Nagas. It is nice to have you here at ATS.

And yes, it would be hard for any of us to notice evolution in one lifetime for that reason.

Thanks, gander. I certainly don't think subaquatic-colonies is a new idea (just look at that game, bioshock), but I really think it's under considered because it certainly has merit.

I've actually been writing up a plot for a book on the idea.

I wanted to make a long, tightly reasoned, link-saturated post on this thread but I find I'm too lazy. So I'll just say what I think and why.

I think people are evolving faster than ever.

Before I explain why, let's get the 'proliferating weaklings' argument out of the way.

It's true that people with genetic and behavioural defects don't get culled mercilessly in modern society the way they did on the African savannah or even in the Middle Ages. But there's a difference between surviving and passing on your genes. You have to live till you're old enough to have kids, then find somebody to have them with, then live long enough and be able enough to raise them till they're old enough to look after themselves, find spouses of their own and have grandchildren.

That's not so easy.

And the human gene-pool is bigger than the Pacific. Almost seven billion of us - that's enough scope and more to carry all the genetic diversity you want, including a lot of personal genotypes that last for a while and eventually get bred out of the population. In fact, the danger is not so much that you hang on to the bad genes but that you swamp the good ones. There's a phenomenon population demographers call 'regression towards the norm' that makes the descendants of people with exceptional abilities less talented than their forebears - things like Olympic-standard fitness and intellectual genius rarely run in families (though artistic talent seems to).

So the fact that the carriers of relatively deleterious genes survive in a humane world in no way causes the human genome to deteriorate.

Now for the evolution bit.

The drivers of evolution are:

1. mutation
   
2. genetic drift
   
3. environmental change (where 'environment' is used broadly to denote everything from the weather to the toilet habits of your relatives)
   
4. sexual selection

Mutation is what causes new genes to appear. Many of them are highly deleterious, and organisms carrying them are never born, or are handicapped in life. But some survive, adding to the the palette from which natural selection chooses its colours.

Genetic drift is what we were talking about before. Another source of new genes. It creates variety in a population. So long as the new gene doesn't code for something nasty, the gene is carried in the population until natural selection selects it out. So - salamanders in different colours and with different sexual habits, etc. All doing perfectly fine until...

Environmental change occurs. It is Nature's winnow, the engine of natural selection. It sieves out bad genes by presenting the species with survival challenges, which the fittest survive.

But Nature has another winnow, and it's called

Sexual selection. It happens when one sex in a species gets hooked on a particular characteristic of the opposite sex and prefers mates who display it. That's the way peacocks' tails happened. Some people say it's the way language happened, and civilization too. Sometime it works in tandem with natural selection, but often it works against it, producing traits and characteristics that are actually a handicap - like peacocks' tails, imagine the energy it takes to grow one of those and carry it around - but valued because they advertise the owner's fitness (he can grow and carry his tail and still survive and overcome rivals).

Okay, now let's ask ourselves: which of the above drivers of evolution are present in the human condition, and which are absent?

Mutation, in an environment contaminated with the outfall of two hundred years and more of industrialization, is likely to have increased rather than decreased. i wonder if anyone has trustworthy statistics for this; probably not. What do you think?

Genetic drift increases with size of population. 6.7 billion people on Earth. Need I say more?

Environmental change? We've change the blessed climate, for heaven's sake. But maybe you don't believe in that. You don't have to. Look at our megacities, our megaslums, our industrial wastelands, our monocultural farmlands which, in biodiversity terms, are deserts. Look at our society, punch-drunk with the speed of change, barely able to swallow, let alone digest, one new world-shaking revelation after another as the old certainties topple. Our social relations - families, mates - turned into a chaotic experiment.

And finally, we have

Sexual selection. Hahahahaha! Have you seen what's happening? In the last hundred years and especially since the Second World War, the power balance between men and women shifted - first in the West, to be sure, but it has spread and continues to spread - for the first time in, probably , a million years. I think that has to affect us. And it's actually been coming for a long time before that...

With all the drivers of evolution still functional, I would imagine that humans are evolving at a furious pace. And various studies (this is where the links should come in) have actually suggested very strongly that this is true. So does anecdotal evidence such as that from the director of The Right Stuff, who said he found it hard to cast the test pilots because 'you don't see faces like that any more'.

I think we're evolving. Fast. And I'm all for it.


[edit on 20-9-2008 by Astyanax]

We, collectively, are not "evolving". No way, no how. Just like Spy66 said, technology is evolving and our understanding of that technology. We, as physical beings, are not evolving because of the suppression needed to develope or produce things.

Our minds have to expand in order to evolve. Not the expansion into "things" but the expansion of understanding the self. In other words, you have to look inside to evolve.

A good book I suggest reading is Prometheus Rising by Robert Anton Wilson which goes into great detail about this and is easy to follow.

Correction: I should have said that we all evolve to a certain point, then stop. The vast majority of us never truly live up to our full potential.

[edit on 20-9-2008 by JimBeam]

................yes, I see what you're saying and agree to a degree.

I'll pull you up on this:

Mutation is what causes new genes to appear. Many of them are highly deleterious

No. Mutations are almost always completely neutral. Of those that aren't, the majority are deleterious.

And environmental change and sexual selection are grouped under natural selection.

The other thing is that I've read a few studies explaining how humanity has a very low biodiversity. Our modern mercy means that the diversity in humans is growing far more now than at any other time in our development. Right now I see that the evolutionary processes, for the most part, has temporarily stagnated.

My family has a strong history of heart attacks even before the age of 50, and looking back through my genealogy, I'm almost fated for it. This is a family trait for us Knowlers. But it's still going to get on. It's deleterious but it ain't leaving the gene pool.

Fortunately looking at my genealogy, I can see that I wont go bald or go grey before I'm 75. I also see that my forefathers are also good at surviving their heart attacks, (my great granddad had 4) yet we all seem to hit 85, most hitting 90.

I think our gene pool is just gathering non beneficial genes as our numbers grow.

reply to post by Good Wolf

Many of them are highly deleterious

No. Mutations are almost always completely neutral. Of those that aren't, the majority are deleterious.

Many, not most.

[edit on 20-9-2008 by Astyanax]

Originally posted by Good Wolf

My family has a strong history of heart attacks even before the age of 50, and looking back through my genealogy, I'm almost fated for it. This is a family trait for us Knowlers. But it's still going to get on. It's deleterious but it ain't leaving the gene pool.

Fortunately looking at my genealogy, I can see that I wont go bald or go grey before I'm 75. I also see that my forefathers are also good at surviving their heart attacks, (my great granddad had 4) yet we all seem to hit 85, most hitting 90.

I think our gene pool is just gathering non beneficial genes as our numbers grow.

It's all in your head.

Everybody in my family wears glasses(brother, sister, mother, my dad did, aunt, uncle, etc.), I'm the only one in my entire family that doesn't wear glasses and have 20/10 vision. My mother's dad went bald and my brother went bald. I still have a full set of hair on my head and am in my 30's. I could end up going bald or have to wear glasses at some point, but it's all up to me.

It's in my head.

The minute you decide that your fate lies in your genealogy, it will.

Viruses are an example of our bodies evolving, they are updating ourselves to protect us and thats how they will always be constantly changing to suit the situation it is in. And can even evolve to reject some types of medicine thats a fact

i dont think man is evolving at the rate he once was. The fact is, man manipulates his environment to suit him. We create new technology which means we do not need to "evolve" physically. We dont grow shells or horns, because we make weapons (bad comparison i know) but mentally speaking we are and will continue to evolve.