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On a slightly related topic, I remember to have seen an exposition where an artist was asked to represents what a human who has naturally evolved to survive a c
by abricq 2y ago
On a slightly related topic, I remember to have seen an exposition where an artist was asked to represents what a human who has naturally evolved to survive a car crash might look like. And it has a cool / terrifying website: http://www.meetgraham.com.au/view-graham http://www.meetgraham.com.au/view-graham
Quite fascinating topic to wonder about: how long will it take for the modern era to genetically change us ?
- highcountess 2y agoTo answer your question, it already has changed us in many ways. You are not the only one who does not realize this though. It is in fact the prevailing position. We have diseases and genetic defects, among other impacts through modern behaviors and environments/toxins, which are also retained in the genetic mutational load. We even have a whole lot of energy and human activity working to counter evolutionary pressures and assure those accumulated mutational loads remain in the genetic code.
- amanaplanacanal 2y agoFitness depends on the specific environment the creature is in. Environmental fitness for the ancestral environment when all humans were hunter-gatherers is not necessarily the same as fitness for living in an industrial society. Evolutionary pressure still works just fine.
- spacebanana7 2y agoHumans are beyond evolution. There's no meaningful selection pressure in our environment that kills people before reproductive age, so there's no reward for adaptations.
- _DeadFred_ 2y agoThat's what the build up of plastics in our testicles are for.
- mattigames 2y agoI have always considered that a bug, not a feature.
- svara 2y agoTotally wrong, killing humans is not required for evolution. Ignoring genetic drift and taking into account only natural selection, all that's needed is differences in fitness, i.e. differences in how much an individual contributes to the gene pool of future generations.
- hammock 2y agoThis. “Natural selection” refers to selection and survivability of traits, not of individuals. Evolution is how that selection process then manifests itself over time in a population.
- Galaxeblaffer 2y agocan't remember where i read this, but significant and big leaps in evolution seem to often happen in times of crisis when the environment forces it. that's not to say that evolution doesn't happen all the time with little pressure it's just very slow when things are more stable. by extension big leaps in evolution can really be down to a low number of individuals. read an article about a genetic study claiming the human population was down to a few thousand individuals around 90k years ago.
- quesera 2y agoPunctuated equilibrium. Not sure if he's the originator, but I'm pretty sure I learned about it in a Richard Dawkins book.
- pfannkuchen 2y agoCrisis presumably doesn’t affect the rate of mutation, so is the mechanism here just that there is a tight filter that from the perspective of future animals made the species more like themselves, because by definition the future animals have passed the filter? Like the traits must have already been present in some lower frequency pre crisis, and the crisis distills the traits which are selected for by the crisis. So probably less evolution moves faster during crisis and more that there is an interesting survivorship bias related to crisis when analyzing the change of a species over time.
- washadjeffmad 2y agoInteresting. So how do you explain menopause and other population or age scale adaptations? Humans aren't individuals, no matter how certain blips of modern culturalism pretend.
- snarf21 2y agoReally? I was under the understanding that we have continued to get taller and bigger driven by out our access to nutrition and medicine over the last couple of centuries.
- InfiniteLoup 2y agoIs this really a genetic adaptation to the environment or rather fulfilling the inherent growth potential that would otherwise be inhibited by nutrient deficiency?
- _DeadFred_ 2y agoBy all the 'no one under 6'2"' tinder jokes I'd say it's being incorporated into genetics.
- swalling 2y agoDead wrong. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recent_human_evolution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recent_human_evolution
- ninetyninenine 2y agoThere is incredibly high sexual selection. Birth control is effecting this. Note that sexual selection selects for health, wealth and reputation. Women are doing most of the selection here.
- SamBam 2y agoEvidence? Take just the easiest to measure of those factors, wealth. Per your hypothesis, wealthier men should have more babies. Do you have any evidence that wealthier men have more babies? In fact, it's quite the opposite. There is a strong inverse correlation between wealth and number of babies. Both globally [1] and in the US [2]. There is some data that you can seek out that will suggest the trend is reversed in some first-world countries in the past couple of years, but that's no where near enough time to draw conclusions. Is there real evidence that men with greater "health" (besides the obvious, of, say, having a crippling disease) or "reputation" have more children? I'm sorry, but this sounds like "women only chose alpha males" junk to me. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_and_fertility https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_and_fertility 2. https://www.statista.com/statistics/241530/birth-rate-by-family-income-in-the-us/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/241530/birth-rate-by-fam...
- ninetyninenine 2y agoPer my hypothesis I never said wealthier men should have more babies. Birth control is a factor here. Women do marry and prefer richer men. Hypergamy is scientifically true, you can look it up if you want. But birth control changes the outcome even though hypergamy is an influencing factor. In addition I said health and reputation are factors. So a man with good health but low wealth has one positive factor in his favor. I feel your entire reply is rude and over the top. Calling my statement junk is not conducive to discussion.
- SamBam 2y agoOk, fair enough, I didn't mean to be rude. It's just that it sounds a lot like stuff that people who push fairly sexist stuff say. The thread is about evolution, and sexual selection in the context of evolution generally implies having an evolutionary fitness. I missed the part about birth control, since then we're not really talking about whether sexual selection is having a role in human evolution. In the context of sexual selection affecting evolutionary fitness, it seems clear that there is an inverse relationship between wealth and number of offspring. I am not sure if there are any scientific studies purporting to link "reputation" and either marriage or offspring. Do you know of any?
- dekhn 2y agoI believe we are currently measuring recent functional selection on humans and it's non-zero. That is, empirically you are incorrect.
- red-iron-pine 2y agono one is having babies mon ami. birth rates are declining. it's not about killing people before reproductive age, it's about absolute numbers of offspring born. dying before reproducing ensures that number stays 0, but you can still hit sexual maturity and not reproduce. plus there is a fertility window -- after 50 most humans, male or female, ain't having kids (a handful of rockstar types whelping babies at 80 notwithstanding). there is a TON of meaningful pressure in our environment, like the inability to have a living wage reducing how many Gen Z's are marrying and having kids.
- thaumasiotes 2y ago> it's not about killing people before reproductive age, it's about absolute numbers of offspring born. Technically, it's about averaging offspring (weighted by your genetic contribution to them) across all of time. If you have 30 children, and all of them starve to death before reproducing, you've reproduced less than your neighbor with the one child and one grandchild. But that's impossible to calculate, so mostly we just have to work with number of children. This detail, though, is something you might want to keep in mind when looking at reports of "effective population" in the past. Any actual population in the far past who end up being wiped out in the middle past are excluded from the "effective population" that we calculate. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effective_population_size https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effective_population_size
- toasterlovin 2y agoIf there's a fertility gradient based on heritable traits then there is evolution happening.
- steve_adams_86 2y agoThis simply isn't how evolution works. There's no way to be "beyond" it. It's an inevitable facet of populations of living organisms. If a population used genetic engineering to collectively ensure their genetics didn't change, no mutations, no other populations involved, then... I guess? Otherwise, there is this staggering multitude of influences. Living longer and reproducing longer is a huge weight on the scales of evolution. Why does anyone need to die early for it to work?
- immibis 2y agoDoes everyone have two children?
- JumpCrisscross 2y ago> Humans are beyond evolution Empirically false [1]. The median artery is a poignant example from the industrial era [2]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recent_human_evolution#Early_Modern_Period_to_present https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recent_human_evolution#Early_M... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Median_artery https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Median_artery
- s1artibartfast 2y agoInteresting article on the median artery given that there is no proposed advantage to the phenotype that is increasing in representation. My understanding is that evolution is specifically directional change in response to a pressure, not random drift or coincidence. Is it accurate to say a trait evolved if the change in prevalence is entirely incidental and tied to a second Factor? Is it accurate to say a trait evolved if the change is a regression to the mean in the absence of pressure? I went looking for papers on why the median artery might be selected for, and one hypothesized that it may be grouped with, fetal deformities, such as spina bifida, which are increasing not because they are advantageous, but because adverse selection pressures are diminished. Another hypothesis is that the variation in median artery is not reflective of a change in genome, but change in environmentally triggered gene expression associated with maternal health.
- JumpCrisscross 2y ago> one hypothesized that it may be grouped with, fetal deformities, such as spina bifida, which are increasing not because they are advantageous, but because adverse selection pressures are diminished Nobody seems to have studied the effects of a persistent median artery on dexterity (important amidst increasing literacy and now phone/computer use) or forearm circumference (looks hot).
- s1artibartfast 2y agoDexterity would be an interesting one. Whatever it is (direct or associated) must be a strong force to triple the prevalence in 150 years or so. Thats like 15% growth each 20-year generation, which would be a huge difference in reproductive success. I think this puts a pretty strong indicator that it's not a genome shift but something else
- JumpCrisscross 2y ago> There's no meaningful selection pressure in our environment that kills people before reproductive age War and disease. Rich countries can afford defence and healthcare. Poor countries cannot. (Within rich countries, the kids of the rich see war and disease less. They're more likely to be in offices, not on the battlefield and they're more likely to be educated and vaccinated.) And even rich countries have periodic selection pressures. Natural disasters. Pandemics. Addiction epidemics. Propensities towards violent altercations or risk-taking behaviour. (Exhibit A: young men in cars.)
- BurningFrog 2y agoMen will evolve to manage sperm banks and fertility clinics.
- MrLeap 2y agoAfter the high profile grossness with those, you'd think every person using those services would do a paternity test just in case.