Evolutionary trends might be reversed when athletes displaying roid rage shoot their girlfriends in toilets.
My recollection of articles I read on the topic of organically grown veggies is that the differences in nutritional composition, when compared to those grown in accordance with modern agricultural practice, if any, was found the be insignificant and that no study has yet conclusively proven them to be healthier (for the eater). It was found that there was a substantially more significant variance in nutritional composition when comparing various cultivars of the same fruit or veggie, irrespective of how it was produced.
A well written article in the British Medical Bulletin (http://bmb.oxfordjournals.org/content/87/1/7.full) inter alia states:
"the performances of athletes are the product of genetic endowment, hard work and, increasingly, the contribution of science. The latter began many years ago, when scientists, physiologists, kinesiologists, nutritionists, biomechanists and physicists began applying their knowledge to the benefit of athletic performance. As a result, ongoing practicing of a sport for hours is no longer enough to enable an athlete to win. Future limits to athletic performance will be determined less and less by the innate physiology of the athlete, and more and more by scientific and technological advances and by the still evolving judgment on where to draw the line between what is ‘natural’ and what is artificially enhanced.
I hate to be a sourpuss, but I don’t agree wiht this either, it’s fine to joke about human evolution and all, but claiming it to be really so is just exploiting misconceptions about how evolution works, as far as I understand it doesn’t work on an individual level, but it usually has to do with a population of people/animals over time, plus I can’t see how athletes are their own population.
In fact you can really argue that we have effectively stopped evolving alltogether with modern science and medicine helping us all live longer and even helping people that would normally not be able to have babies to get pregnant with invetro fertalisation. As we’re talking about change on the population helping the disabled, people with genetic diseases and other stuff survive and procreate means all those stuff is just carried forward again to the next generation. Ok so that sounds a bit nasty, but I mean this goes for intellect, looks, athleticism and everything on the whole just stay the same for the most part and the gene-mix still remains mostly the same, untill you think about inter-racial/national pairings up of people, then we might be thinking of evolution again, maybe someday we will only have one race (not as in one race the human race saying I like, but as in there really just being one asian-black-white-pink mixed race, wouldn’t that be something!)
I prefer Rigil’s answer on statistics best, greater pool of people coupled with technological improvements and more competition is a good answer for why we seem better.
I think the only things that are really evolving is the bugs we get, like drug-resistant TB and other illnesses that combats things like antibiotics and stuff.
In fact you can really argue that we have effectively stopped evolving all together
We have?? I realise this off the topic but I believe we are still evolving and will for as long as we survive whatever holocaust awaits us.
To quote Dawkins: “The reason why I am confident about selective breeding for athletic prowess is that the qualities are so similar to those that demonstrably work in the breeding of racehorses and carthorses, of greyhounds and sledge dogs” (Dawkins, R “the Greatest Show on Earth”; p 38).
The demands for athletic prowess and the financial rewards attached to this (e.g. very tall basket ball players) translates into selection of tall people as an almost automatic “qualifier” in basket ball and as Dawkins states further: …“can anyone doubt that given enough generations, the same deformity could be achieved by selective breeding, after the manner of Friesian cows” (p39) (here he was saying women who have been bamboozled by the myth that breasts like melons are attractive, could be bred with big breasts!!).
“Enough generations” are not as many as one would think. Geneticist Belyaev changed the nature and appearance of foxes in a mere 6 generations through selective breeding. To take this further Steffi Graf marries Andre Agassi: say offspring marry latest tennis stars to say 6 generations…you could ostensibly produce athletes that glide across the tennis courts, never miss a volley/first serve, destroy the opposition, etc. The mind boggles but is that too imaginative? (Of course this does not address the moral desirability or Hitler’s Social Darwinist theories).
Dawkins does also say that it is not just a matter of artificial selection. In the case of domestication of wolves (or evolution of dogs) it took a complicated array of natural selection as well.
The suggestion that humans have somehow stopped evolving betrays a lack of understanding of evolutionary processes. The fact that we have “artificial” ways of staving off death for many of our weaker members (i.e., we can avert much of evolution’s selection process) cannot be taken to mark some kind of stasis or end point of human evolution. The point to realise is that, barring a major catastrophe, evolution always increases genetic diversity, and that it doesn’t simply stop trying new tricks when a niche has apparently become completely filled. As one biologist once very insightfully put it, “Evolution is cleverer than you are.” (<-- It’s Orgel’s Second Rule.)
Well at some point it must start with an individual, I mean at some point in history there must have been the first person with blue eyes.
In any case I think top performing athletes have a better chance of passing on there genes more than lets say and old Joe soap, so natural selection will favor them.
;D Yeah and don’t forget a really sucky debater, so not the point I was going for! LOL But I agree I am for a large part a complete ignoramus. I focussed on evolution by natural selection, and I wished to show that we’re not evolving naturally as science and modern medicine are helping so-called “weaklings” survive that would otherwise not and keep their genes in the genepool
I was really trying to say that as far as natural selection goes, we’ve pretty much warped it with medicines, the other point I was trying to argue against is even the best athlete may have really bad traits that aren’t that preferable and s/he then marries a non-athlete, let’s say a model that’s just pretty without much athletic ability or much intellect and that person also have really bad traits fixed by medicine that gets passed on.
Very well put. ;D
This is actually the point I failed miserably to argue against. I don’t see that children always follow in their parents’ footsteps and also people don’t necessarily marry someone someone with the same job/talent as themselves and even if they do chances are the athletic parent’s kid grows up hating sports, becomes a rock star and marries a dancer or whatever, after all we don’t select by who has the best genes, we select by who we love, and I saw this natgeo program a while ago where this jewish professor made some point about our sweat and pheramones and how we’re attracted to someone who is more genetically different than us.
Yeah, I got that, and I really do dislike derailing threads but these are widespread misconceptions that IMHO need to be pointed out when they are mentioned.
This is a lot like the “It’s just not natural” argument against GMO foods. If one accepts that humans are entirely the product of natural forces, then it would be absurd to call their actions “unnatural”. Just because we can do certain things in a deliberate, directed way with some particular goal in mind doesn’t suddenly make those actions “unnatural”, even if those actions may have unanticipated and/or negative consequences. This does of course not mean that, like nature, we can’t at times be entirely misdirected or callous or brutal in our actions.
With particular reference to evolution, if one accepts that humans are the outcome chiefly of evolution by natural selection, then one must also accept that our ability to manipulate our environment and to protect our weaker members is just as much natural selection as becoming a lion’s Kentucky Unfried Sceptic in the bush because you didn’t see her soon enough. More than that, the moral sense that impels us to give aid and shelter to our weaker members must itself equally be a product of evolution by natural selection, and so in this case it’s a specious distinction (pun very much intended) between the actions of nature and those of people.
On Sunday evening during an episode Cosmos Neil Tyson was relating the inevitable future of the sun and, equally inevitably, speculated about the possibility of humans leaving the earth in the very distant future, but long before the sun pulls its final incinerating stunt. Only, he said, it won’t be humans leaving the earth, but creatures quite similar to humans. That was quite a thought!
(The discussion over here was along similar lines, i.e. what is to become of the human species due to the effect of evolution.)
Since then, I have stumbled across the notion of a primitive species. A primitive species is a modern creature (i.e. not extinct) that essentially looks the same as its prehistoric ancestors. Examples of primitive species are crocodiles and coelacanths and sharks. Evolution has had little effect on them phenotypically. Or at least not since they first looked like sharks a very long time ago.
What causes a primitive species? Clearly their body shape were less prone to evolutionary effects than those of others. Genetic variation is presumably a given for all animals, so why did these guys appear to stagnate in their current form? Or maybe stagnate is the wrong word … perhaps they are simply optimised for their essentially unchanging environments.
In any case, that’s what I think lies in store for humans. We are on the verge of becoming a primitive species.
But how nice would it have been if we could speciate into a few specialist but closely related apes. From our current stock of humans, we could selectively breed talented bipeds that can live under water, or in a vacuum, or who are exceptionally adroit at tiddly-winks. And we could have super-philosopher apes agonizing over the ethics of it all. Whoo-hoo!
Yup, that’s basically it. Such species also exhibit somewhat greater resilience and behavioural adaptability to environmental changes.
That could well be the case but for reasons different to those for sharks or crocs. We are able to control our environment in significant and conscious ways through technology in order to adapt it for our own benefit. On the other hand, we are nonetheless at the mercy of certain potential hazards that could wreak extensive havoc with our species, at least for now until appropriate technology is developed and deployed. Superbugs, asteroid collisions and radiation showers are among these possible threats. Should a mass extinction event occur that leaves just a few small isolated groups of people here and there, you can be sure that their genomes will begin diverging and continue to diverge for as long as the isolation persists while they are still genetically able to interbreed.
All of this sounds a lot like HG Wells’ The Time Machine.
If such selective breeding were to occur, I would suggest in the interest of the survival of our species: We should focus on breeding a race of “people” more fit for space travel. The only way we could avoid the mass extinction events Mefi mentions is to “diversify our planetary portfolio”.
I would guess that any attempt at selective breeding will require substantial political clout or force. When I was doing research for my novel, I was contemplating these possibilities but eventually opted out due to the short 80 years that transpired after the Apocalypse struck leaving only 5% of mankind behind. The one tribe (Caesareans) though that branched out from the survivors (120 persons) of the Airbus that crashed on the plateau in Ethiopia start showing some beastial tendencies, blood rites etc while the Jesuits degenerated into fundamentalists(easy route) and become more reminiscent of the Dark Ages/Inquisition religionists. A small criminal group eventually become cannibals. Mebbe the sequel (titled Christians, Cannibals and Cannabis)should accentuate the poor gene pool and ultimate degeneration (a la the excellent “the Lord of the Flies” by William Golding).
