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Mighty Hiker
climber
Vancouver, B.C.
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Our future as a species is being determined in Asia, home of over 50% of us.
The peoples of Africa are more genetically diverse than those of the rest of the world, combined. This suggests that they may be better able to adapt to whatever environmental challenges we create for ourselves.
As for the questions, I'm not a geneticist, but will make some guesses.
1. Are humans still evolving?
No reason they shouldn't be, and hybrid vigour from interbreeding of previously separated populations may lead to interesting results. I don't know that we can evolve to have larger brains, or that that would be an advantage. Can human females give birth to children with larger brains, and survive? Alternatively, if the brains grow further after birth, would an additionally prolonged adolescence be beneficial? Perhaps the brain can evolve in other ways, of course.. Anyway, we're surely still evolving, it's just a quesion of how.
2. Is group selection, as advocated most notably by the evolutionary biologist E.O. Wilson, a viable process for explaining things like altruism or can this be explained entirely by selection at the organism or gene level?
If we can select some people out of SuperTopo, or at least just ignore them, that may demonstrate this hypothesis.
3. What is the likelihood that the emergence of life on a planet will lead to intelligent life given 100s of millions or billions of years of evolution to work with.
I'm not sure that humans are intelligent or civilized yet. After 4.53 billion years, give or take, we like to believe we are. My guess is that unicellular life is fairly common in the universe, but that it rarely evolves to more complex forms, let alone intelligence.
On a related note:
Eventually the US government will feel pressured into a rover/return mission to Mars, perhaps followed by a human flight. It will be a response to a possible Chinese manned Moon flight, and if the current series of increasingly sophisticated probes (and a rover/return) lead to the conclusion that Mars once had a real atmosphere and surface liquids for any length of time (almost certain), and that there is sufficient liquid water in the interior that life might still exist there.
If we get to the point of detecting oxygen atmospheres in planets orbiting other stars, we'll have a real challenge figuring out what to do.
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MH2
climber
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//The first group to do this will dominate. Go watch the idea in the movie Gattica. That film covers much of this, including actual genetic descrimination.
The time is rapidly approaching when we will be able to create our own evolutionary fate.
//
Science fiction can be viewed as a form of contingency planning. Robert Heinlein is one among several authors to speculate on our evolutionary future, for example in Beyond This Horizon (serialized in 1942) and Assignment in Eternity (1941-49).
It's hard enough to come up with a zombie plan, never mind a superman plan.
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WBraun
climber
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Bruce
Genes DNA etc etc are all there.
I don't discount gross material nature at all.
That's impossible to do.
It's a bonafide fact.
For hypothesis and theoretical sakes you can make any argument, assertion or whatever.
You can spend innumerable life times searching after the answers to those and continually suffer birth death disease and old age in an endless cycle.
Although western materialistic science and western Christianity discounts reincarnation the fact remains that it is factual truth.
If you study material nature you can easily see it.
But the goal is not to reincarnate ........
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WBraun
climber
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why don't we see it
We ...
It should be you don't see it.
Just as the average tourist can not see the route on El Cap but you can.
In the same way one must train up to get the knowledge to "see".
One doesn't become knowledgeable even on the material platform without extensive training in education in schools and Universities.
Even a mechanic needs to train up.
You get the idea.
One problem is there are many cheaters.
And we've all been cheated, some of us for many life times ......
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WBraun
climber
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Remain a cynic.
Also remain on guard.
Never blindly accept anything.
Don't worry you are always free to choose.
I'm not selling anything ......
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Ben Emery
Trad climber
Australia via Bay Area via Australia...
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Interesting thread, thanks for starting it.
In terms of whether people are still evolving; maybe.
Some evolutionary theory suggests a model where most species are fairly static for most of their history, punctuated by rapid ("rapid" being a relative term here) changes that form the steps between species. I don't think we've changed greatly as a species in the past 100 thousand years (happy to be corrected)?
I'm sure there will be modest drift in the human species over time, but at least at the moment I can't see a strong survival/breeding advantage in being intelligent, for example, so I'm not sure we're evolving further in that direction any time soon. Likewise, I can't see any evolutionary advantage to being able to complete a 100m sprint in record time (unless there is data out there suggesting Olympic medalists have 10 offspring on average).
If the species or an ancestral species survives long term (not a given), I suspect our next major stage of evolution will have to wait until a crisis or major event causes either a bottleneck in the population or a strong selection process (e.g., an isolated population in space, or a global famine reducing us to a handful of individuals).
BASE104's ponderings over whether human evolution will be an active/directed process via genetic engineering is an interesting one.
Brave new world indeed.
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eeyonkee
Trad climber
Golden, CO
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Topic Author's Reply - Jan 2, 2013 - 07:04am PT
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Good responses, and thanks for the links! Base, I'm completely with you that the future of "evolution" of humans will likely be based on self-engineering and technology. It will simply be so much faster than natural selection. Seems to me that two other ways for significant change would be one or more major pandemics, in which, as MH and others have pointed out, the great genetic diversity in Africa would likely come into play. Another, suggested to me by a friend, would be if we survive long enough to become a space-faring species. A small group of people who become separated from the rest of humanity for long stretches of time would almost certainly start evolving faster, since there could be no remixing of genes with the mass of humans on the planet.
Turns out Werner, the idea of cheaters is a big one with respect to the second question. The foundation of Dawkin's problem with group selection is that cheaters would ruin it before it ever really got going.
To anyone interested in the genetic basis for altruism/empathy I would highly suggest reading 'The Selfish Gene'. For all of the ideas it packs, it's short and a relatively easy read. If you're not already familiar with some of the ideas, you'll come away looking at this subject in a completely different way.
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Jan
Mountain climber
Okinawa, Japan
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Regarding Ander's comments:
The peoples of Africa are more genetically diverse than those of the rest of the world, combined. This suggests that they may be better able to adapt to whatever environmental challenges we create for ourselves.
Maybe we can say that Asia will determine the future of the human race based on sheer numbers if all goes well, and Africa with its greater genetic diversity will save us if we face a catastrophe? For sure, between them with diversity and numbers, they have the best chance.
I don't know that we can evolve to have larger brains, or that that would be an advantage. Can human females give birth to children with larger brains, and survive?
We could indeed give birth to babies with larger brains if those brains were added to the top of the head. One theory about the extinction of the neanderthals who had around 300 cubic centimeters more brain than modern Homo sapiens, is that their large brain caused many maternal deaths due to the fact that it was stacked in the back, making for a head that was very wide coming down the birth canal. Homo sapiens by contrast, had a smaller brain and stacked on top resulting in a high forehead compared to neanderthal and less width in the birth canal.
Alternatively, if the brains grow further after birth, would an additionally prolonged adolescence be beneficial?
I think this has already happened for cultural reasons and why not? If we now live to 80 instead of 50, why shouldn't we lengthen the period of childhood and adolescence with its great potential for novelty and learning?
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Tony Bird
climber
Northridge, CA
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this is a stoopid thread. we had an interesting discussion going on donini's ignorance thread, but yonkers here has co-opted all the evolution true believers away from that. now donini's thread is dying a predictable death.
these are not interesting questions, yonkers.
1. of course humans continue to evolve. do you even understand the premise of standard, government-issue evolution? but the big problem is the direction of evolution. women are not getting prettier, they're getting fatter.
2. altruism is merely a concept contained in the wishful thinking of the researcher. it's the most subjective thing imaginable. i'm being objective about that.
3. you should go back and study GI evolution again. if you get your dates right, you might begin to ask some "interesting" questions.
sheesh, can't believe this: "given hundreds of millions or billions of years". here's the time line, buster:
12 billion ybp (years before present, so's you don't get confused by the birth of jesus), big bang happens.
5-6 billion ybp, our solar system confabulates; prior to that we had the evolution of quasars, protogalaxies and a bunch of astrophysical stuff it wouldn't hurt you to study up on. don't overlook the role of supernovas and the triple alpha process, which produces the element carbon, and which caused fred hoyle to stop being an atheist.
2.75 billion ybp we have amino acids, zapped in the tidepools by lightning, beginning to replicate the little link-ups they naturally form just lying around. eventually this "evolves" into dna, we get cells, probably viruses first, then fancier stuff. life remains unicelled for more than another billion years, but then the little buggers start building alliances (aka organisms), and, alas, they start eating each other as well. this is so sad, when you think about its implications for our future right now (because we are continuing to evolve).
so these klunky kritters keep on cooking and then comes the cambrian explosion. wowee. somewhere, deep in that dna, lies the propensity to experiment. it all gets on the fast track. vertebrates evolve out of a dumb-looking cambrian thing that happens to have a spinelike structure just to keep it swimming. from this come the great dinosaurs, then the great mammals, then the great humans. hooray for us!
the great humans started anthropoidizing outa fellow primates around 6 million ybp. i think the latest on homo sapiens (humans who can act like saps) puts our breakaway from other anthropoids at around a million years. don't think fellow primates are not intelligent. don't think ungulates are not intelligent. don't think dinosaurs were not intelligent. they were probably pretty in their way too, but not in the way of certain contemporaneous human females. (there's a whole thread on supertopo currently devoted to the latter, which is probably dying out. it makes me so sad that i have quit posting on it.)
the above dates are subject to immediate and possibly drastic revision based on next month's issue of the british magazine nature.
i see werner has come over here. i think he's running from me. i'm determined to figure out whether he's a sourpuss or not.
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Tony Bird
climber
Northridge, CA
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moosedrool, stop drooling. i am not a troll, and i have never been. learn the difference between discussing and arguing. then start discussing here by telling me why you think eeyonk's questions are interesting, which i still contend they are not. a discussion has a thread. an argument consists of people clobbering each other with points of view which are inflexible. there is no thread running through an argument. it just reaches loggerheads.
my problem with this thread is that we had a good one going on donini's post and it knocked all the wind out of the sails there with three questions which i think are absolutely inane, and which exhibit little or no knowledge of the sophisticated contemporary debate on evolution.
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eeyonkee
Trad climber
Golden, CO
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Topic Author's Reply - Jan 2, 2013 - 10:52am PT
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At least you got the time lines right, Tony.
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Jaybro
Social climber
Wolf City, Wyoming
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Best thread of 2013!
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Tony Bird
climber
Northridge, CA
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"species" is a relative term, without precise scientific definition, something every genetic engineer knows.
donini posting a political topic? i beg to differ. he would never do such a thing.
moosedrool, i'm serious about this suggestion. stop dumping. true, you're not the only person who dumps, but if you want to ratchet up the tenor of the discussion a bit, put all this important information in your own words, if you can. if you're not familiar enough with the material to do that, maybe you should read it a little more closely yourself. these threads get impossible when the "argument" just becomes a battle of mouse fingers cut-and-paste. digest it. put it in your own words. and keep it short.
i don't mind commenting on your choice of an academic debate maven to lecture us on the use of metaphor. having wasted four years of high school, when i could have been seriously misbehaving, bamboozled by a pushy nun to squander my quality time on her debate team, i'll tell you an important lesson i learned about "debate" as it's conducted in the u.s.a. it's a great training ground for the development of argumentative lawyers who can slither like skinny reptiles from one side to another. it sure isn't a place to foster discussion, which is a much friendlier thing, a place where people compare notes, have a little respect for each other, and attempt to arrive at a new position, if it's possible. debate results in clobbering each other with warring positions, and it's further abused by the kind of dumping we get here. back on the debate team, if you had a quote, that proved everything. the idiot with the most quotes wins. no one did much critical thinking about whether the quote, usually lifted from time magazine, was worth a rat's rear end.
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Borut
Mountain climber
Ljubljana, Slovenia
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Hello
I myself had a pair of rambo evolutions LOL - I know, off topic...
This subject is too tough for me.
In fact I'd like to share some of Keith's posts filed under 'evolution' : http://dedicatedtothegame.com/category/evolution/
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WBraun
climber
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Nothing here is really original. We shape our views based on the work of other people.
Yes, completely true.
Everything is already there .......
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Tony Bird
climber
Northridge, CA
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so--we shape our views based on the work of other people. should i gather, then, that anyone with something original to offer--in 2013 a.d., of course--is being pretentious?
seems like you've got werner on your side, moose, which is no mean accomplishment. i wonder what it was like--what year would that have been, werner, along about 537,646 b.c.?--when someone actually thought an original thought. maybe it never happened.
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WBraun
climber
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When someone discovers something "new" that new was already there.
Even so called original thought.
All thoughts come out of the supreme universal consciousness .......
There is always a reference point.
Even the gross materialists have their reference point for example .....
NIST
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SteveW
Trad climber
The state of confusion
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Greg
Here's an interesting article in the new issue of Orion. . .
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MH2
climber
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Everything was already here 5 billion years ago. And 13+ billion years ago. It remains of interest just how the parts rearrange now and then.
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