Re:Dog ejected from car during Sunday crash found on sheep f...
by wizzwizz4 on Thursday June 10, 2021 @04:29PM
(#27465361)
> We've merely changed them, quite significantly. But there's still selection processes ongoing.
Hence “mostly”. But evolution requires large time-scales to function; selection for arbitrarily-fluctuating criteria is practically no selection at all.
Re:Dog ejected from car during Sunday crash found on sheep f...
by TameAntelope on Thursday June 10, 2021 @02:36PM
(#27463939)
You can't breed humans because you can't isolate or consistently provide for an environment for long enough, considering how long it takes humans to mature.
Anyone trying to sell you on selective evolution is either ignorant or has an ulterior motive. There's a reason people tend to hear, "Racism!" when this sort of thing gets said -- it's not based at all in science, so what else would it be based in?
Re:Dog ejected from car during Sunday crash found on sheep f...
by jerf on Thursday June 10, 2021 @02:58PM
(#27464248)
I'm not talking about "breeding" humans as a deliberate process; I used the term in the passive sense that evolution ever "breeds" anything. I'm saying, evolution is still functioning. Who has children and what happens to those children is not uniform simply because some illnesses that used to kill us are now survivable. That was never the only effect on our evolution anyhow, merely a particularly visible one. Many other effects are still in play. It's a myth that evolution has been shut down just because one particular mechanism has been partially blunted. Certainly the net effect has been a population explosion of late, but that's still only on a short evolutionary time frame (and we kinda already know that it can't continue much longer, re: climate change and such), but that doesn't mean every fertilized egg is surviving completely undifferentiated from any other, nor that there are any other selection processes in play.
No, we haven't. We've merely changed them, quite significantly. But there's still selection processes ongoing.
Since people tend to hear "Racism!" when this sort of thing gets said, the pressures I'm discussion includes things like being able to survive the civilization's schooling system (teen suicides don't have offspring) and the different ways of attracting and being a good mate than one would pursue in an agrarian or hunter-gather society, such as being a visibly wealthy nerd. There's a lot of things still affecting and shaping civilization through who has how many children with who and how they treat them, and I haven't got a personal list of "good" or "bad" such effects, because it's not really about "good" or "bad", they just are, no matter what labels you put on them.
Another example is the hypothesis that a significant part of why "autism" is on the rise is "assortative mating", or, to put it another way, that there are evolutionary pressures in modern society creating couples who end up essentially breeding for traits that, when overexpressed, may be called "autism". I'm not making a claim that is necessarily true, but it's an example of an evolutionary theory applying in the here & now.