On Sep 1, 2004, at 3:04 PM, Alberto Monteiro wrote:
Warren Ockrassa wrote:
Humans are a peak in evolution, because we can't evolve further except by artificial means.
Um, can you substantiate that, or is it strictly opinion?
AFAIK, it's the scienfic consensus that any huge and prosperous population can't evolve, because evolving into another species requires huge changes in a small population in a short interval of time.
Depends whose consensus you pay attention to. ;) There's gradualism -- still -- and punctuated equilibrium -- and IIRC there's a synthesis, a sense that evolution can and does happen both ways.
However, an assumption that seems to exist here is that we (as a global civilization) will not really change very much, technologically or otherwise, over timespans that register on the evolutionary scale. Even the small, rapid changes you see in PE take place in considerably more time than h. sapiens has even existed.
I can't determine what means for change, artificial or otherwise, might be at our disposal in just 50 years -- but I also can't predict whether we'll continue our evident precarious stability; nor can anyone easily conclude that we will *exist* still in half a century.
For that reason I'm not sure I'd be sanguine about making absolute declarations of our species' evolutionary immutability.
Any huge change in mankind would be suppressed by the other 6 billion human beings.
So far that hasn't happened. Socially and technologically tremendous changes have taken place in the last 200 years and not been suppressed by the majority.
Also, probably changing to a "better" kind of humans might require spending lots of generations into a "much worse" kind of human, and this can't happen now.
Ah, but I wasn't thinking of better or worse -- just different. That's how evolution works too. Changes may or may not cause a creature to be better suited to its environment; they might even be neutral from a survival point of view. But ideas such as better or worse simply don't apply.
-- WthmO
More fun than a bucket of live bait. But not as much fun as a trailerful of raccoons. --
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