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Evolution and technology. Have we hit a plateau?

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Nickolay

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Joined
Feb 26, 2006
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I was thinking about evolution as I was reading the other topic on this board and something occured to me. What got me thinking was that natural selection works on a principle of the survival of the fittest. However, when you look at us and how far we've come with technology, you will start to see that this is no longer the case. With medicine and sanitation as advanced as ours, we pretty much don't have to worry about diseases killing off a major part of our population that otherwise would not have made it, and would not have passed on its genes. Not to mention that with our technology, predators are no longer a problem and the tigers and lions we used to spend a good portion of our day running away from now sit in cages for us to gawk at.

I remember a sequence in the movie Waking Life where an old man is talking to the main character about evolution and how it's been speeding up over the years, with successive advancements in technology happening faster and faster. This man also predicts that at one point we wil hit a sort of vertical asymptote where we will be evolving constantly at an infinite rate. Now this sort of confused me, maybe because my feeble human mind cannot comprehend the concept of infinity, but maybe it is because this guy was full of shit. As far as I know, technology has nothing to do with evolution, and I'm now starting to think that the point at which our evolution supposedly started speeding up (the point at which our technology started getting better faster) was actually the point where it started to slow down.

What do you guys think about this?
 
You don't get it. We are hungry blind and dumb because we are at a plateau. I'm saying that evolution might be stopping because it's not the survival of the fittest anymore. You no longer have to be an alpha male to pass on your genes. If you have a sort of susceptibility to a disease or are not very healthy you can still survive thanks to modern medicine, whereas a few thousand years ago you'd be weeded out as one of the unfit.
 
Nickolay said:
You don't get it. We are hungry blind and dumb because we are at a plateau. I'm saying that evolution might be stopping because it's not the survival of the fittest anymore. You no longer have to be an alpha male to pass on your genes. If you have a sort of susceptibility to a disease or are not very healthy you can still survive thanks to modern medicine, whereas a few thousand years ago you'd be weeded out as one of the unfit.
Click to expand...

thats why we should have laissez-faire capitalism - so we can weed out the stupid and weak naturally - unless someone wants to voluntarlily help them then that is their perogative. Sometimes the best way to help people is to help them help themselves - think about that.
 
Footloose said:
thats why we should have laissez-faire capitalism - so we can weed out the stupid and weak naturally - unless someone wants to voluntarlily help them then that is their perogative. Sometimes the best way to help people is to help them help themselves - think about that.
Click to expand...

Are you suggesting that if no-one takes it upon themselves to help them, then society should just allow the physically or mentally disadvantaged to rot?
 
Footloose said:
thats why we should have laissez-faire capitalism - so we can weed out the stupid and weak naturally - unless someone wants to voluntarlily help them then that is their perogative. Sometimes the best way to help people is to help them help themselves - think about that.
Click to expand...

Social Darwinism is sooo passé. Get with the times already! :p
 
Nickolay:

This is my basic interpretation so if this is incorrect then disregard the post below.

I interpret your question as saying that since we have technologically and intellectually hit a point where we no longer need to rely on biological evolution to survive but instead on our intellectual and technological evolution, that our biological evolution is started to slow down and in a sense created a sort of plateau?

In other words, now we can rely on our brains to survive so our brauns ceases to change?

If this is incorrect, please correct me.


I believe that this can only be true if you view the mind as a secular unit from the physical body.

I personally view the mind as a manifestation of the physical body. For instance, love is merely a chemical reaction which results in addiction from pleasure. You become addicted or in love with your mate because of instant gratification. Your consciouss processes this into an emotion which we intepret as love.

Since feelings and emotions are subjective, we interpret this biological, physical and chemical reactions differently. As such, I believe the consciouss is a manifestation of our physical experiences and events based off of the chemical, physical and biological actions in our body.

Looking through my lense I see that mind is manifested out of body.

Looking through your lense I see a body secular from mind.

Therefore if you assert that our genetic evolution is no longer a product of natrual selection and that our mental (intellectual) evolution is beginning and our physical (genetic) evolution is no longer a factor, then through my lense you would see a contradiction.

I posit that our genetic evolution is essential to our intellectual evolution because I believe the mind is manifested out of the body.
 
Interesting idea.

I think biological evolution will now be lending itself to intellectual evolution, and also, social evolution. As a species, thought is becoming homogenized through the advent of mass communication between individuals. This homogenization of thought will force the dumb to become dumber, and, as always, the cream will rise to the top.

With time, the race will probably split into Homo sapiens majora and Homo sapiens minora. The majora will be significantly more intelligent, more adaptive, and further removed from our cro-magnon ancestry, while the minora will continue to be like humans as we know them today: dumb, maladaptive, and animalistic.

Higher awareness can only go higher. Geez, I could go on for hours with no apparent direction. Damn, now I can't really remember the point I was trying to make.
 
I think physical evolution of humans may have slowed down a lot, but mental evolution could be whats next for us.

i skimmed the rests of the posts, so if this has already been said, i apologize.
 
Similar to what has been already metioned, I think evolution will just take a different tack. Instead of being physical, it will be more mental. Intelligence has a large genetic component, and usually more intelligent people marry other intelligent people.... In fact there's an interesting evolutionary "experiment" going on in Silicon Valley in CA, where there is a huge percentage of the youth population as compared to anywhere else in the world that has autism/Asperger's, a condition linked heavily with unusual math and science skills. I think we'll see more and more of that kind of thing in the future.
 
complexPHILOSOPHY said:
Nickolay:
I posit that our genetic evolution is essential to our intellectual evolution because I believe the mind is manifested out of the body.
Click to expand...
So do I, I just didn't think of the idea of intellectual evolution (I'll admit this was one of those rushed morning topics). I like the concept, do you know of any good reading material on the subject that's worthwhile? (online or off, doesn't matter)
 
If you think we're even close to a plateau, you're crazy. Living conditions for a lot of people in the world are radically different compared to those present 50 years ago, which were radically different compared to those 100 years before that, and so on. It's not just brains, either. Intelligence has been under positive selection in the human lineage for a long time, and it hasn't stopped, but there's a shitload of other things too.

In the first world, sexual selection is at work like never before, because people have many more people to choose from and women call a lot of the shots. The desire to have children is now more important than the desire to have sex, at least among social classes where contraception is common. Being an alpha male does not necessarily mean reproductive success. Bill Gates only has 3 kids, although he has the resources to provide for thousands. George Bush only has 2. Brad Pitt doesn't have any.

The propensity to have allergies, diabetes, cancer, mental instability, all this is being selected against. Cancer especially. We're all sitting around taking radiation baths from cell phone towers, computer monitors, the sun, etc. This is producing some effect.

HIV resistance is a winner. That's under positive selection I suspect.

Fat storage is out. High metabolisms are in.

And so forth.
 
^^^

I agree with pretty much all of that that except for the cancer, and any other old age disease. Because those don't get you untill after you've spawned and reared your children. There is little about evolution and natural selection that eliminates old age diseases, or old age in general. Young people will become more resistant to toxins, but there will still be cancer in old age.

Or let me put it this way. If you have gene that makes you susceptable to cancer at age 55, it won't significantly lower the likelyhood of you having children. If you have gene that makes you susceptable to cancer at age 15, it will significantly lower the likelyhood of you having children. So there's evolution against cancer in that respect, which will happen in response to increasing toxins in the environment. But old poeple will still get cancer.

And so what? We are adapting to our own pollution?
 
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This might be something you all would want to read up on, "the singularity", technological singularity... evolution of computers accelerating at an accelerating rate, imagine when computers start building computers and how fast evolution will blast off from that..

http://www.singularity.org/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_singularity

http://www.singinst.org/

taken from http://sysopmind.com/singularity.html -
If computing speeds double every two years,
what happens when computer-based AIs are doing the research?

Computing speed doubles every two years.
Computing speed doubles every two years of work.
Computing speed doubles every two subjective years of work.

Two years after Artificial Intelligences reach human equivalence, their speed doubles. One year later, their speed doubles again.

Six months - three months - 1.5 months ... Singularity.

Plug in the numbers for current computing speeds, the current doubling time, and an estimate for the raw processing power of the human brain, and the numbers match in: 2021.
Click to expand...

random snips from google searches on "the singularity"

The Mayan/American cosmology explains many other aspects of this world
that 2012'ers seem to relate to.

Second, it has been astronomically calculated that on this date our sun
will conjunct the galactic center. This fact supports the theory that our
evolution is governed by what is called 'The Precession of the Equinoxes'
- which describes a roughly 24,000 year cycle of rotation through the
galaxy. 12,000 years a spent in galactic day and 12,000 during
galactic night.
We are at the end of galactic night... (our present time is the moment
before dawn). this also coincides with the geological record of ice
ages/pole shifts every 12,000 years. thus, many might argue that the
year 2012 indicates a transition point from the Age of Pisces (which
we've been in for over 2,000 years) to the Age of Aquarius.

Now this might not sound terribly scientific or rational, but keep in
mind that this is precisely what the transition from the age of Pisces to
the age of aquarius implies... we are moving in understanding from a
'binary' cosmology in which a thing is true or it is not, to a
'holistic' cosmology in which a thing is true and false at the same
moment- depending solely on one's perspective.
Click to expand...

Now you can browse web pages all day long about this singuarity stuff and disagree with whatever you want, but can you read this stuff (from plenty of sources) and come and say its NOT going to happen? or.. something *very soon* will happen?

There's the mayan calendar stuff, 2012, then Mckenna's timewave (also ends on the same date as the mayan calendar), but now we got the singularity institute, organisations popping up about this, books written, heck i've seen it on TV twice now!

I believe most of us, if we can manage to stay alive for the next 6-10-20 years will get to witness this black hole of the evolution type, maybe not "witness" but I bet in just a few years, most people will be aware of the coming "singularity" because it'll be all over regular media by then and regular people will be talking about it.

I can't find anything, anywhere from anyone trying to say this ain't gonna happen, its just sorta inevitable.. but people really into it disagree on when it'll happen.. 2010..2025... but you'll have a hard time finding any or many of them that think it'll be past like.. 2050.

My thoughts on this is its like we are an unborn fetus thats developing. Think of all the cells and your nervous system/brain/etc before you were born. Things were set in motion, and then you developed into a human over ~9 months.

When one smokes enough DMT to enter DMT hyperspace, and see the little elves and stuff, in a totally alien like universe with alien dimentions and all that, maybe thats like another way of looking at the entities within us that went through their own evolution - they all lived a life as whatever they were and advanced themselves / connected all together eventually to form a born human.

We're "waking up" to be a superhuman :). Or call it a metamorphasis, like a caterpillar learning how to be a butterfly.. the caterpillar doesn't know its gonna be a butterfly because its too busy being a caterpillar..

gone, gone beyond, gone beyond beyond
Click to expand...
 
Nickolay said:
I was thinking about evolution as I was reading the other topic on this board and something occured to me. What got me thinking was that natural selection works on a principle of the survival of the fittest. However, when you look at us and how far we've come with technology, you will start to see that this is no longer the case. With medicine and sanitation as advanced as ours, we pretty much don't have to worry about diseases killing off a major part of our population that otherwise would not have made it, and would not have passed on its genes. Not to mention that with our technology, predators are no longer a problem and the tigers and lions we used to spend a good portion of our day running away from now sit in cages for us to gawk at.

I remember a sequence in the movie Waking Life where an old man is talking to the main character about evolution and how it's been speeding up over the years, with successive advancements in technology happening faster and faster. This man also predicts that at one point we wil hit a sort of vertical asymptote where we will be evolving constantly at an infinite rate. Now this sort of confused me, maybe because my feeble human mind cannot comprehend the concept of infinity, but maybe it is because this guy was full of shit. As far as I know, technology has nothing to do with evolution, and I'm now starting to think that the point at which our evolution supposedly started speeding up (the point at which our technology started getting better faster) was actually the point where it started to slow down.

What do you guys think about this?
Click to expand...

ive talked about this with some people and the consensus was simple: although our genes will still change, they won't change according to survival of the most fit to survive

thus, humans might branch into many directions genetically, over a very long period of time

guiding factors might be those genes more likely to pass on offspring in our society, ie, pretty people instead of fit people (although right now they are the same)
 
yaesutom:
Also, there's the quantum computer, the invention of which should be coming in the next several years which will make computing 'speed' an obsolete term. With computers that work at the speed of light, who knows about the possibilities.
 
Along with yaesutom, I'm coutning on the singularity. If you think about the time scale that evolution works on, chances are our technology will create far more significant advances in the time it takes for one advantageous gene to propagate throughout the population. Biological evolution and natural selection as we know it has effectively come to an end. from here on out its all about how our intellect/ai can think up ways to improve the human race/intelligence.
 
For instance, love is merely a chemical reaction which results in addiction from pleasure. You become addicted or in love with your mate because of instant gratification. Your consciouss processes this into an emotion which we intepret as love.
Click to expand...

I disagree, what about those people who will be willing to die for their loved ones? The connection that exists between 2 people in love is spiritual in a sense.

From a biological standpoint, love is a trait acquired by natural selection. The species that have parents that intend to fight to the death for their young will most likely be the species that have the greatest potential to survive to the next generation.

There is obviously more to love than the chemical reactions of neurons.
 
human intelligence has actually spawned possible threats to human life. Nuclear and biological warfare, pollution and mutated diseases are just a few of the risks that we face daily.
 
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