Where is Evolution Going?
- Thread starter CriticalSock
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icebear
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Kid Eager
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I love simple people who don't understand questions.
SomedayGirl
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Aridas
Crazy Little Green Dragon
Well... you've tried to argue that. The problem was that all your arguments failed to stand up to scrutiny. Maybe you could try to actually present something valid in the thread that you've got already to back your words up?
Red Baron Farms
Philosopher
This is light hearted and fun right? If that is the case, I see the trend being first to intermingle the races so our current racial distinctions dissolve away, then to "create" new races based on physical and mental capacities. For instance a race of athletes further divided into sub races strength athletes, finesse athletes, endurance athletes. Maybe a nerd race. Politician/leadership race. Worker race. Warrior race etc. ie. Kind of a macro version of the high school cliques. But I don't see those new races ever diverging enough to be separate species. I can't see that far.
Of course intellegence is a survival trait, but I think cooperation is stronger. I see individual intelligence on average decreasing, but group cooperative "intelligence" increasing. Remember both Neanderthal and European Early Modern Humans (cro-magnon) both had on average larger brains and a more robust physique than modern humans. That doesn't necessarily mean they were better smarter stronger athletes, but it seems likely individually they certainly could have been. However cooperation beats out individual attributes almost every time. Two heads really are smarter than one. So I suspect that the obstetrical dilemma favored smaller heads once cooperation became more important to fitness than individual traits. Now that medicine has nearly solved the obstetrical dilemma, I see the very short term trend to smaller brains (intelligence?) on average stabilize except for the possible emergence of a "nerd race".
No. Mammals are just getting started.
Tons of fossils. All kinds both actual humans and artifacts. Thick like seams of coal only orders of magnitude more. But no insectile archaeologists. If not human then another primate, or even possibly some strange octopus that evolved to become air breathing to fill niches on land. (if we somehow loose the major land species). But not insects.
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Frozenwolf150
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I would prioritize nerve regeneration, then we can talk about accessorizing.
Wolfman
Chief Solipsistic, Autosycophant
Evolution, in terms of natural selection for genes that best ensure survival of the species, is pretty much dead in the water for humans. As others have mentioned, the forces that generally shape such evolution are simply not really factors any more. We no longer have isolated populations where particular genes will come to dominate in response to local populations; instead, we have massive intermixing of genetic pools. Nor do weaker individuals die or fail to pass on their genes any more; quite the opposite, we are doing everything we can to ensure that individuals who once would have died before passing on their genes will now be able to do so.
I'm not saying that this is a bad thing. Evolution has, up until recently, been an entirely random affair, with no 'goal' or objective. And it's messed up more than a few times, it's hardly been a straight line to 'improvement'.
In another thread, I took objection to a transhumanist's vision of the future -- a misanthropic vision in which he labels modern humans as 'inferior' and 'undesirable', and envisions some sort of 'superior' life form or intelligence that essentially renders humanity obsolete (and eventually extinct).
However, I do share some of the trans-humanist vision, in that I believe that our 'evolution', as such, will no longer be a random process with no specific goal. With our rapidly increasing understanding of and control over genetic processes, we're already starting to take over from "evolution", correcting what we see as errors, and even giving genetic assistance to improve people. It's not likely that long until we'll have the ability to improve intelligence, longevity, etc.; while also conquering many genetic-based diseases and disorders.
But there's another form of 'evolution' that I think is just as important, if not moreso. Just as our bodies have formed as a result of random processes, so much of what shapes our sense of morality and ethics are also a result of random biological forces. Yet, just as we are now able to take greater control over how our bodies develop, and decrease the role of 'natural' evolution, so we are no also taking significant strides in terms of evolving our sense of morality and ethics.
Not just things like getting rid of slavery, battling inequality, etc.; but we're starting to develop a real international empathy, where the problems of other nations are no longer ignored, but are seen as part of 'us' as a species. When disasters happen, we contribute and help out on a scale that is entirely unprecedented in human history (although it still has a lot of room for improvement). People that only a generation ago were written off as useless, and hidden away in back rooms -- those with significant mental or physical disabilities -- are not only being incorporated into daily life, but we're finding that many of them are able to make meaningful contributions to our lives as well.
It's difficult to point to significant physical changes to the human body over the past thousand years -- what changes have taken place are more due to changes in diet and medicine, than to any evolutionary force -- but in a moral and ethical sense, we've gone through a period of very rapid evolution...and it is still continuing.
So long as evolution was a random affair, there simply weren't moral or ethical issues to it. Evolution "just happens", it is neither good nor evil. But the moment that we, as a species, started taking control of it, and guiding it, then morals and ethics became part and parcel of the process. Because such changes as we may be able to make will have a massive impact on us as a species -- over the long-term, we're talking about nothing less than entirely re-shaping humanity. And questions of what should be done, how it should be done, and who it should be done to (ie. is it available only to those who can afford it, or is it available to everyone?) are of critical importance.
Today, we face situations and decisions that evolution itself simply did not prepare us for, and that evolution on its own cannot possibly hope too address; the pace of human-guided change far, far outstrips the pace of evolutionary change.
Unlike every other species that has ever existed, we actually have choices: choices as to whether or not we want to run ourselves to extinction; choices as to how we can improve ourselves; choices as to what directions we will take; choices as to what "humans" will be like in the future; and choices as to what kind of moral and ethical systems will be the underpinnings of those future societies.
I remain cautiously optimistic. Not in a blind, "humans can conquer anything" or "the human spirit will always prevail" kind of way. There are a lot of ******** out there, and we'll never get rid of ******** entirely. But we are gradually decreasing the number of people who are willing to follow those ********, while gradually increasing the number of people who desire to help and assist those in need, regardless of race, gender, nationality, or any other such consideration.
I'm not saying that this is a bad thing. Evolution has, up until recently, been an entirely random affair, with no 'goal' or objective. And it's messed up more than a few times, it's hardly been a straight line to 'improvement'.
In another thread, I took objection to a transhumanist's vision of the future -- a misanthropic vision in which he labels modern humans as 'inferior' and 'undesirable', and envisions some sort of 'superior' life form or intelligence that essentially renders humanity obsolete (and eventually extinct).
However, I do share some of the trans-humanist vision, in that I believe that our 'evolution', as such, will no longer be a random process with no specific goal. With our rapidly increasing understanding of and control over genetic processes, we're already starting to take over from "evolution", correcting what we see as errors, and even giving genetic assistance to improve people. It's not likely that long until we'll have the ability to improve intelligence, longevity, etc.; while also conquering many genetic-based diseases and disorders.
But there's another form of 'evolution' that I think is just as important, if not moreso. Just as our bodies have formed as a result of random processes, so much of what shapes our sense of morality and ethics are also a result of random biological forces. Yet, just as we are now able to take greater control over how our bodies develop, and decrease the role of 'natural' evolution, so we are no also taking significant strides in terms of evolving our sense of morality and ethics.
Not just things like getting rid of slavery, battling inequality, etc.; but we're starting to develop a real international empathy, where the problems of other nations are no longer ignored, but are seen as part of 'us' as a species. When disasters happen, we contribute and help out on a scale that is entirely unprecedented in human history (although it still has a lot of room for improvement). People that only a generation ago were written off as useless, and hidden away in back rooms -- those with significant mental or physical disabilities -- are not only being incorporated into daily life, but we're finding that many of them are able to make meaningful contributions to our lives as well.
It's difficult to point to significant physical changes to the human body over the past thousand years -- what changes have taken place are more due to changes in diet and medicine, than to any evolutionary force -- but in a moral and ethical sense, we've gone through a period of very rapid evolution...and it is still continuing.
So long as evolution was a random affair, there simply weren't moral or ethical issues to it. Evolution "just happens", it is neither good nor evil. But the moment that we, as a species, started taking control of it, and guiding it, then morals and ethics became part and parcel of the process. Because such changes as we may be able to make will have a massive impact on us as a species -- over the long-term, we're talking about nothing less than entirely re-shaping humanity. And questions of what should be done, how it should be done, and who it should be done to (ie. is it available only to those who can afford it, or is it available to everyone?) are of critical importance.
Today, we face situations and decisions that evolution itself simply did not prepare us for, and that evolution on its own cannot possibly hope too address; the pace of human-guided change far, far outstrips the pace of evolutionary change.
Unlike every other species that has ever existed, we actually have choices: choices as to whether or not we want to run ourselves to extinction; choices as to how we can improve ourselves; choices as to what directions we will take; choices as to what "humans" will be like in the future; and choices as to what kind of moral and ethical systems will be the underpinnings of those future societies.
I remain cautiously optimistic. Not in a blind, "humans can conquer anything" or "the human spirit will always prevail" kind of way. There are a lot of ******** out there, and we'll never get rid of ******** entirely. But we are gradually decreasing the number of people who are willing to follow those ********, while gradually increasing the number of people who desire to help and assist those in need, regardless of race, gender, nationality, or any other such consideration.
Manopolus
Metaphorical Anomaly
To some degree this may well depend upon whether the females of the species value a certain degree of intelligence.
Delvo
Дэлво Δε&#
Intelligence on our level does the same job as evolution: adapting to circumstances. It just does it much faster.
What do you mean by "dead end"? Doomed to go extinct soon? Never going to evolve into anything other than a mammal? (There's a difference because a lineage could live a long time without ever becoming anything else; sponges, for example, have been here about as long as any moving animals, probably longer, and never evolved into anything but sponges. That could be called a dead end, just a pretty long one.)
Probably. They've already been here longer than that, especially reptiles, which have been here several times that long. A big broad group including lots of different species is hard to eliminate.
Even the least intelligent humans (without severe neurological deformities) are still much more intelligent than anything else, and couldn't live a human life if they weren't.
There can even be a link between physical traits and the behavioral things you're talking about. Some of the physical changes that have been happening in humans right up to the most recent times are the same changes we get without planning for them in domestication of other mammals, so it looks as if we're domesticating ourselves.
Delvo
Дэлво Δε&#
With aliens, the question changes from "Can evolution get from A to B?" to "Can evolution get to B at all from anywhere?", so the answer is usually bound to be yes as long as the end point doesn't violate a law of physics, chemistry, geometry, or such.
In Wikipedia's list of organisms in NHoaA, the only one that stands out to me as having a basic physics/geometry problem is the "pagoda tree" (which I've seen somewhere before). They said the relatively small number of very large disks-shaped leaves are supposed to increase the surface area for absorbing sunlight and gas, but it would actually do the opposite. A large number of tiny structures will yield many times as much surface area in the same amount of space, which is why Earthling trees' leaves are the way they are, as well as the insides of our own intestines and lungs.
On "Alien Planet", giving a planet "low gravity and a thick atmosphere" is a common meme in science fiction (such as "Avatar") to make it plausible to have more cool fun stuff: more flying/floating/gliding, bigger sizes, and funkier less compact shapes with more spindly bits sticking out. As a justification, it generally works OK, but one flying critter took that theme too far with its methane-fuelled organic jet/rocket engines. That type of engine is great at hundreds of miles per hour, but at a much lower speed like what was shown, it's exremely inefficient with fuel/energy, and a thicker atmosphere (which helps some flight modes by generating more lift but also generates more drag) would only make it worse, and the animal's body didn't include much storage space for fuel. So the jet trick, even granting that it's possible at all, couldn't be used for more than short occasional bursts, like a lot of other animals' fast-but-inefficient top speed modes. But they were shown cruising arond that way all of the time.
On the ground, the predilection for bipeds and the fact that at least one of them apparently was blind don't defy physics, but are peculiar enough to look like the creators were just thinking "weird and different" more than "realistic and likely". One of the bipeds has a front foot and a back foot, and is shown galloping. Without separate right & left legs in front and back, it would need wide feet for left-right control, but they didn't make its feet wide. About the amoeba sea and sea strider, too little detail is given to say they're physically plausible or implausible. I liked the use of sonar, which becomes more practical & likely the thicker the air is. Sometimes the sounds even sounded a bit like underwater sounds, which was good because thicker air would act more like water, whether or not that's what the sound designers were thinking when they came up with those sounds.
I didn't see it, but, going by Wikipedia's critter list and searching for images of them by name...
At 5 million years: mostly just minor adjustments to present animals, which make sense and don't bump into any particular reasons why they couldn't happen. A small-jawed, small-toothed predator turning saber-toothed makes me wonder, because other saber-toothed animals have only existed in environments where the herbivorous prey were huge, but I can't say it's just wrong.
They did get pretty weird about the birds, though. The amount of change from caracara to "carakiller" is enormous for just 5 million years, including one part (reversion of wings to dinosaur arms) that's unprecedented. I don't get how they picked which present bird to say this happened to, since the end result has practically no connection to the starting point. And there are intermediate stages they'd need to rush through along the way that are similar to real birds that have stayed roughly the same for several times that long, such as turkeys. Then they have two other bird species ending up in specialized forms based on quadrupedal or duadruped-derived real-life models, implying that those birds, with no quadrupedal ancestors since before the dinosaurs, became quadrupeds again along the way just so they could then switch to imitating moles or seals, which also requires changing the specialization of the front limbs in at least one case and getting the back to move in ways no saurischian's back has ever moved in the other case.
I guess the reason they got carried away with the birds, and borrowed from mammals to do it, was because birds haven't yet taken on as much variety of forms as mammals have. Unfortunately for that line of thinking, there's a reason for that. In general, once something is specialized, de-specialization or a change in specialization doesn't happen, at least not in only about as much time as we have been separate from chimpanzees. It's not just that we're talking about changing birds to a form based on certain kinds of mammals; suggesting bats evolving into something like moles or seals, especially so fast, would create just about the same problems.
At 100 million years: This is plenty of time for large-scale changes. For example, most major groups of mammals separated & differentiated from each other less than this long ago. So I generally won't complain about changes being too drastic for the time allowed.
Most of the suggested organisms are described taking paths that some real ones have before, so they're known to be possible. Sometimes there's just an issue of what steps would be needed to get there. The biggest one is coming out of the water onto land, which is a neat trick for an octopus. But they did at least think about what the challenges were and address them. It's still crawling around in swamps and its overall shape looks like it probably still swims too, so it might not need any other way to avoid dehydration yet. I can see that four of its arms are modified for minimal support & locomotion on land. The big thing that leaves is breathing air, and the pictures I see have a couple of extra holes that present octopuses don't have, so I'll figure those are for the respiratory system. Where a respiratory system came from, I don't know, but it doesn't really matter as long as the creators thought to put something there. (Real animals evolving from aquatic to terrestrial have handled respiration at least three different ways.)
If a tortoise stands up on vertical legs and is much bigger than an elephant, why does it still have a shell over its shoulders & hips? (Not an problem, not wrong, just makes me wonder why)
Why are poggles the last land mammals (and relegated to caves)? Mammals aren't going extinct without something specific causing it. Is the global temperature supposed to be to high for the rest?
At 200 million years: I don't understand flish. Pictures of one of the two species look like birds, and pictures of the other look like fish (with funky extending jaws). If they're supposed to be derived straight from "flying fish" without walking first, then not only did their fins need some work to be able to flap, but there's a huge energy utilization gap for them to have bridged. I believe flying fish don't have lungs, but even if they do/did, a lungfish "lung" is just a bag of air, and birds' lungs are much more complex and have higher gas exchange capacity than even mammals'. What drove the improvements before these critters began flying? Also, the described activity level for at least one of the two species means it must be warm-blooded, but fish aren't, because of water's low oxygen content and high heat transfer rate compared to air, so when & how did this one get warm-blooded? I won't say there isn't any evolutionary path to get to an animal like what they had in mind, but I will say it can't really be called a "fish" anymore, any more than real tetrapods are fish now, and calling it that is obscuring what the possible paths might have been.
Is physical support for lichen trees addressed? Normal trees deposit wood inside themselves, made from a protein and a polysaccharide. But how they do that is related to the fact that they're vascular (they have vessels), which lichens are not. I guess we're just supposed to infer that they must have evolved a way to produce something like wood, and probably had to become vascular first, which would have made them not really what people think of when they see the word "lichens" anymore.
If slithersuckers have as much structure and structural integrity to them as those ribbony hanging things in the pictures, then they're not slime molds anymore, even if they did descend from one. Slime molds are just fungi whose intercellular matrix material allows the cells to move past each other a lot; solid molds and other fungi have substances connecting the cells to each other more solidly. To convert one to the other, just change the recipe of the intercellular stuff. But these are also said to be carnivorous; how do they kill?
Squibbons... didn't "tree squid" originate as a joke? I can't tell which structures in the pictures are what, or how big they are, so all I can say is that if those things came from squid, then they're full of modifications making them not much like squid anymore, which is fine because they'd need to be. We could make a list of specific changes they might need along the way, but the show's creators have given no reason to think that it couldn't have happened in this case.
But I'm not buying the megasquid. One of the images you can find of it explains how its legs, which have gotten thick, straight, stumpy, and vertical, hold up its tons of weight using a pattern of muscles aligned perpendicular to each other, instead of a hard skeleton. I'm not aware of any precedent for that, but even if it can work, it doesn't keep the internal organs together on top of the legs, so where's the support for the guts? Worse yet, the same diagram says air gets into the lung through the mantle. You can't use diffusion at that size; you need a macrosopic, specialized system of organs using macroscopic holes on the outside. Why did they follow that with the swampus but not here?
Evolution isn't exactly random; it's chaotic. There are random elements to it--such as bolide impacts and the like--and it's too complex for the question "How will the biosphere evolve?" to have any specific answers, but we CAN predict it. There are both broad trends in evolution that we can draw from, and fine-scale processes we can predict with astonishing certainty.
Also, I always find the "Evolution doesn't work on humans" arguments funny. None of them are ever supported by anything more than intuition. The simple fact is, humans are subject to evolutionary pressures, same as everything else. A huge amount of natural selection occurs in utero--why do you think there are still births and miscarriages? There are also things like sexual selection, diseases, and physical constraints (space travel will cause all sorts of fun problems). But the critical aspect these arguments ignore is time. Human lifespans are not, and cannot by, sufficiently long to observe evolutionary changes. Even written history isn't long enough. Humans take nearly two decades to start reproducing, which means that from the start of the Roman Empire to now was approximately 500 generations. Not a lot of time, evolutionarily speaking. And it certainly isn't sufficient time to capture any shifts from local fitness highs (except in the case of Native Americans--the pandemic that wiped out most of them is a MAJOR evolutionary event). Until we have more data, we simply can't say that humans don't evolve. We can speculate, but that's about it.
CriticalSock
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Why do you think it's a dead theory? Because humans have stopped evolving? Or that the whole theory is wrong?
I'm not sure what theory you'd offer up in evolutions place. Creationism? Now that's a theory that's deader than the dodo!
CriticalSock
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I think the argument is "Evolution doesn't work on humans... any more." Sharks and sponges have stopped evolving because they're perfect for their ecological niche. Humans now have the ability to alter their ecological niche to suit their current needs. Food, heat, population density etc. are no longer factors working on us, but are things that we can change at will.
When we move into space we will take this ability with us. Humans won't evolve on Mars, we will change Mars to suit our current requirements. It could be that I'm just being far too simplistic with my speculative models (I'm a total noob really), but isn't the environment the key driver in evolution?
Here's the challange: prove it.CriticalSock said:
Step 1 will be showing that sharks aren't being selectively eliminated.
Also, you may want to examine the highlighted term. That's a pretty bold statement, one I doubt will withstand careful analysis.
To a certain extent, yes. However, what I'm saying is that we can't alter all the parameters of our fitness space, and that we are still subject to the influences of those aspects we can't control. We're not, for example, an infinitely large population, nor are my chances of reproducing with all females equal. These are two of the assumptions in Hardy-Weinburg Equilibrium, and the violation of these assumtions (as in the case of humans) evolution is an inevitable result. Not necessarily directed evolution, but random evolution is evolution.
Most people don't understand evolution, and this is an example of such a misunderstanding. Evolution doesn't say we eliminate members of the group--though that's a powerful way to cause evolution. Differential reproduction is the main way evolution happens. We've altered fitness space, but we have not stabilized reproduction. Some people still produce more children than others. This, combined with variations, makes evolution inevitable. The normal environmental factors aren't necessarily important anymore, but more subtle factors--and factors no other species has had to deal with--still operate. We can correlate birth rates with income (inverse correlation). We can correlate child mortality with availability of medical care. We're still seeing the results of the Age of Exploration in terms of evolution--our population hasn't homogenized, which one would expect from the lack of restrictions to breeding due to increased travel.
It is--but the term "environment" does not mean, in this context, what environmentalists mean when they say it.
CriticalSock
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That was a particularly lazy comment on my part. I should have said sharks have existed in their current form for millions of years, not that they've stopped evolving. Also that statement is just received wisdom that I've picked up from somewhere. I don't actually know that it's true. Even worse, I only included sponges because someone mentioned them upthread as being another example.
There's a quote on this site: http://www.flmnh.ufl.edu/fish/sharks/fossils/fossil_modernsharkteeth.html which says: "Sharks are not very good indicators of geologic age because shark evolution is a relatively slow process. Many of the species found in the oceans today have been around for 4-5 million years."
So sharks seem to fit my (revised) statement, but I have nothing on sponges I'm afraid.
Ah, excellent! This improves my understanding, thank you. So humans aren't in an evolutionary box of their own making and won't be until the chance of reproducing with all available females is equal. Why does the population have to be infinite though? Does infinite in this case actually mean really really massive?
So evolution will continue as long as there are any factors still operating and we haven't eliminated all those factors with our technological wizardry yet.
It's not looking good for my insect overlords.
Problem is, that's morphology. Biochemically, I'm certain we'd find the story is more complex.CriticalSock said:
My point was that you're not going to find anything, either. Sponges are Phylum Poriphera--saying "Sponges aren't evolving" is akin to saying "Chordates aren't evolving". It's simply too broad a catagory for such statements to be made. Some are, some aren't, and some are doing so very slowly; it depends on the sponge species.
There are actually a number of assumptions in H-W Equilibrium; those were simply the two that popped into my head. The reason is mathematics--they are required in order for the math to work. H-W Equilibrium is a working hypothesis that we test populations against, in the absolute certainty that it won't work. The interesting thing is in how the population diverges from H-W Equilibrium. At H-W Equilibrium a population isn't evolving; any divergence may allow for evolution to occur.
Pretty much, yeah. Even if the factors don't actually kill the kid, if they reduce the number of kids that kid will have it can impact evolution. Remember, each such event is being itterated thousands to millions of times per generation, and over multiple generations. Anything times ten to the nineth becomes significant.
Frozenwolf150
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Correct me if I'm wrong, but I was under the impression that humans have not stopped evolving. I suppose my question is, where is evolution going for humans?
Delvo
Дэлво Δε&#
We change our environment, but not into one with no pressures at all, and that's not just because of failure to eliminate some, but also because other new ones are created. For example, sitting for a long time can have bad side effects for the circulatory system, standing & walking on hard flat surfaces can be bad for the leg joints, looking at computer screens can cause eye strain (especially under certain ambient light conditions), and the kinds of foods we tend to prefer eating and the ways our bodies physiologically handle various compounds we've ingested have been leading to obesity. But those things all came from our efforts to make our lives and environment better and easier.
I didn't say sponges aren't evolving or haven't evolved in a long time. I said they haven't evolved into something other than sponges. It was part of my inquiry about what was meant by "dead end", a phrase which I had seen used here but didn't understand the use of. One possible interpretation is extinction; another would be continued existence without leading to anywhere else. But the lack of sponge evolution into a non-sponge doesn't mean that they haven't spent their time here evolving. There are thousands of species of sponge, with their own separate traits, and they evolved to get that way. Similarly, it would be possible for humans to evolve different traits in the future and still be human, and I guess that could be what was meant by the original "dead end" reference, but I had to ask whether that was what was meant.
4-5 million years is pretty short. Most things haven't evolved a whole lot in that amount of time. A more relevant/noteworthy thing about sharks would be that they've been sharks for more than 80 times that long.