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Human Evolution Has Stopped

I'm so glad that Arth started this thread. I just started reading Communication with Extraterrestrial Intelligence CETI edited by Carl Sagan (Wait, let me explain.) and was planning to start just such a thread. The preface was written by Philip Handler, President (in the 1970's), National Academy of Sciences and in it he states:

The biological evolution of man since the appearance of Homo sapiens has essentially ceased...

and

His brain, the physical structure of which was completed with Cromagnon man, has not evolved further,...

The book was written in 1973 and there has been a lot of new data uncovered by science in the interim, but this kind of made do a double take. I couldn't imagine that this was at all accurate. Given the previous posts, perhaps it is not.
 
Natural selection at the replicator level is differential reproductive success of replicators.
that is the only kind fo natural selection. It is not differential it is just reproductive success, the differential only expresses over huge amount of time.
A meme that encourages ethnic cleansing encourages its carriers to disadvantage rival replicators, giving the carrier the opportunity to (differentially) replicate BOTH meme and genes.
Un demonstrated assertion?
You've got to distinguish what is replicating. For example, the elimination of the ethnic cleansing meme may still leave the gene with an advantage.

You arethe one who confused the two, not me.

Um, that still doesn't make sense, the fact that a meme may or may not lead to reproductive success has nothing to do with the passing of the meme and how many people believe it to be true. This is somehwat like questions about why confirmation bias are not selected against.

There are many memes and many that support ethnic cleansing do not lead to greater reproductive success. I am just questioning yet another form of social darwinism.
 
How does one stop something that has no direction?

mmm that sounds like a Bob Dylan lyric.

Are we as a species not becoming more intellegent? The way we are always inventing new things or improving exsisting things, isnt that somehow our brains evolving?
 
If human evolution has stopped, then how come there are still millions of babies born, everyday, each one a little different than the other. Some of whom will eventually die, without reproducing, and others reproducing quite a lot?

Tell that scientist that evolution is NOT ladder. It is more like bush.
 
If human evolution has stopped, then how come there are still millions of babies born, everyday, each one a little different than the other. Some of whom will eventually die, without reproducing, and others reproducing quite a lot?

Tell that scientist that evolution is NOT ladder. It is more like bush.

I agree. Evolution is just genetic change and that change is continuing to happen. It comes in two semantic flavors: natural and intellectual. Natural just gets so dwarfed by all the intentional change that it tends to lose meaning. Lost in the static, as it were.

1) Are we getting smarter? Maybe so, maybe not: define 'smarter'. Bet you can't without invoking survival; a thing we, as humans (as a whole) tend to be good at...we seem to have only three competitors,:ourselves, bacteria, and virus.

2) Are we getting taller and faster? Not so hard to define: and we are. Could be nurture, but certainly aided by intellect. But is it beneficial?

3) Are we beginning to control our own genetics? Why yes! And more so that of others. Certainly intellect. And it dwarfs 'natural selection' by a factor of 10,000. Soon to be 1,000,000. And soon then after to be 1,000,000,000...and soon after then some. Is that beneficial? I'm thinking it is our only hope, but I'm an amoeba in terms of both present and future survival techniques.

Hey, random change (natural selection) will never stop, but we will (by god :) ) refute it as we see necessary (or politically expedient).

Let the argument refute itself. Let's all wait 1000 years (if I'm right) or 1,000,000,000 if I'm wrong.

Middling distances not excluded, btw.
 
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mmm that sounds like a Bob Dylan lyric.

So long as I don't actually sound like Bob Dylan.

Are we as a species not becoming more intellegent? The way we are always inventing new things or improving exsisting things, isnt that somehow our brains evolving?

I don't think there is any evidence to suggest that we are genetically any more intelligent than we were 20,000 years ago. The progress of science and technology is more the result memetic evolution and widespread access to information.
 
I don't understand... how can evolution 'stop' working on a specific species?
As long as there are people who reproduce successfully and people who don't, then natural selection is at work, or am I missing something?

Even if this guy is full of it, is there any way natural selection would stop working on a species other than that species going extinct?
 
Let the argument refute itself. Let's all wait 1000 years (if I'm right) or 1,000,000,000 if I'm wrong.
We can also ask him "When did it stop?". I am even willing to accept a small range of time, instead of a specific point, as the specific point might be difficult to determine, even if he is right.

If he can not define what is meant, empirically, by "stop", nor identify a time period in which the stoppage occured, then the argument will also refute itself.
 
It seems as though he is actually arguing that humans are becoming more homoginized, and fitness is more determined by brainpower, than in the past.

Though, that only argues how the course of evolution is changing, not that it is "stopping".
 
I don't understand... how can evolution 'stop' working on a specific species?
As long as there are people who reproduce successfully and people who don't, then natural selection is at work, or am I missing something?

Even if this guy is full of it, is there any way natural selection would stop working on a species other than that species going extinct?

Not really. Certain species that form spores or other 'stasis' bodies could be said to be outside the reach of evolution if all living examples had died, since the species could not be rightly said to be extinct if the extant spores had the capacity to at some point grow again.

In a similar sense, plants and animals whose seed has gone into seed-banks, where are they are kept in cryogenic or other stasis inducing conditions, if the species subsequently lost all living individuals, could be said to be beyond the reach of natural selection during the gap between the storing of the seed, and the eventual reintroduction of the species using the stored seed.

As a more extreme example, if instead of Scotty getting caught in the transportation buffer in Star Trek, it had been an otherwise extinct species, we could again say it was temporarily not evolving.

All of these examples are effectively identical, and boil down to the species having its reproductive activities placed on hold for a time.

Generally speaking, if a species is reproducing, then it is experiencing evolution. Even a species that reproduces via cloning is subject to the occasional random mutation.

What is probably meant by the people in the original post's references is simply a reduction in the rate of observable non-environmentally induced phenotypic change - since of course, the phenotype is what is generally used to compare fossils, particularly once they pass the threshold of DNA recoverability.

That is, in much the same manner as could be said of coelacanths and other so-called 'living fossils', they claim that humanity has entered a period of low outward change.

Of course, this is manifestly untrue when you consider the relative stature of humans over time, so they must presumably be writing this off to an environmentally induced change, i.e. we are getting more nutrition and health care, and are instead looking for qualitative differences in brain size vs. body mass, or bone structure, etc.

However, even when no visible phenotypic changes are occurring, genotypic changes continue apace - the so-called molecular clock of non-active changes in the base coding of proteins. While useful in biology and constructing biological lines of descent, there is a definite tendency for scientists, particularly geneticists, to refuse this type of change the label of 'evolution,' because the changes so produced are not visible to natural selection (which is why they can continue at a measured and relatively even pace--changes in coding for a given protein that produce an actual change in the protein will either be selected for, or against, but because multiple codons, or base-pair triplets, code for a single amino acid, these can freely change as long as they don't change the amino acid so coded, and the change is invisible to selection because the proteins produced are identical).

In a rather different sense, there are certain species that after existing as sexual species for a period, down-shift into a 'lower evolutionary gear' as it were, by shifting to parthenogenesis, where the species becomes solely female and reproduces by cloning. This drops the rate of production of change on which natural selection has the opportunity to act from the high rate produced by meiosis and recombination down to the much more infrequent rate of random (stochastic) mutation (in the gametic line only, so this is actually even slower than the rate of stochastic mutation in bacteria).

Even though a case could be made that these creatures are evolving more 'slowly' than others, they are in fact still evolving. The bdelloid rotifers diversified into 360 species since they went parthenogenic . . . but like bacteria, they are known to incorporate foreign DNA, so how much of that diversification is due to stochastic mutations and how much to gene-copying is an open question.

Howard, the Grum
 
The Grum;

Remind me not to argue with you. You write like a steam roller.
 
The Grum;

Remind me not to argue with you. You write like a steam roller.

Heh. A cogent and comprehensible steamroller, I hope? I don't believe I've actually entered into an argument on this board as yet.

Howard, the Grum
 
Heh. A cogent and comprehensible steamroller, I hope? I don't believe I've actually entered into an argument on this board as yet.

Howard, the Grum

yes, totally.

have you ever thought of synthetic, illegal drugs as memes?
as if certain molecules are using humans?
 
I wonder how the President of that National Academy of Sciences could think that human evolution had "stopped", in a book edited by Carl Sagan?
 
I don't believe our evolution has stopped, but we have definitly taken an active role in our evolutionary path. I would venture that our technology is now the biggest influence in our evolutionary development.

Our environment does not have the same influence on our evolution as it once did. We create artificial environments in our houses so that we live in constant controlled conditions. We live in relative comfort in almost every environment on the planet. From artic freeze to tropical swealter. We can predict and avoid natural disasters with better accuracy. And predation is a thing of the past. Although some do still succumb to a animal or two.

We combat or controll most diseases. We are able to survive genetic defects that would have been culled out of our genome if we lived without technology. And soon we will be able to correct genetic anomolies with our technology not to mention directly alter our genome.

I see our evolutionary path combining with our technology. (Picard and the "Borg" notwithstanding.)

Who knows, sometime in the distant future what is technological will blur with what is biological in as far as what it means to be human.
 

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