Evolution, yes but how?

Lydzor said:
I think the way evolution works is that it's inherited. So maybe you got it from your mother? :p

Regarding the OP's question though. It has been answered, and really can be summarised in my opinion with "Survival of the Fittest".
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Except that with humanity, it's going into reverse what with all the ne'er do wells having state support to churn out a relentless tide of uneducated leeching slobs. Meanwhile, many hard working people decide that they can't afford to have children so don't bother. :p
 
PianoBasher said:
Except that with humanity, it's going into reverse what with all the ne'er do wells having state support to churn out a relentless tide of uneducated leeching slobs. Meanwhile, many hard working people decide that they can't afford to have children so don't bother. :p
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Unfortunately this wouldn't surprise me. I suppose they are the fittest as they can survive in life without having to work. Wouldn't be inclined to call them the "fittest" though. :D

Which brings up an interesting point. Are we cheating the natural system with our use of medicine? Of course evolution will continue regardless, but there will be generations which aren't considered the fittest passing on their genes. Would a murderer be considered the fittest? I know this is mostly philosophical.
 
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Lydzor said:
Which brings up an interesting point. Are we cheating the natural system with our use of medicine? Of course evolution will continue regardless, but there will be generations which aren't considered the fittest passing on their genes. Would a murderer be considered the fittest? I know this is mostly philosophical.
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Fittest for what is the question here. Hypothetically if this went on long enough people wouldn't live in an environment where you needed genes to help you survive X/Y/Z, so having offspring without those genes would make them less fit for the world we lived in pre-medicine, but suited just fine for the world where there's a pill for everything.

Murder is maybe a bad example. There might be benefits in the short term to murdering your companions but in the long term it's not good for a species!
 
recently read 'the selfish gene' by Dawkins. the thing to get your head round is that a human being or any organism is merely a vehicle. we start life as one cell and end it as one cell, a bottleneck as he described it. the whole purpose of us and the meaning of life , is to replicate the DNA which is carried in our cells. bacteria , viruses, monkeys, and humans are all the same.
 
Lydzor said:
Unfortunately this wouldn't surprise me. I suppose they are the fittest as they can survive in life without having to work. Wouldn't be inclined to call them the "fittest" though. :D
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Fittest is in terms of reproducing, die at 30 but have 10 kids who all go on to die at 30 but also have 10 kids each and you'll wipe out your competitors who live to be 90 and only have 3 kids who go on to live to be 90 but only have 3 kids and so on..


Are we cheating the natural system with our use of medicine?
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Not really, more so though our use of agriculture and engineering than medicine ( even with all the medicine in the world you wouldn't be able to sustain our numbers "naturally")

Of course evolution will continue regardless, but there will be generations which aren't considered the fittest passing on their genes. Would a murderer be considered the fittest? I know this is mostly philosophical.
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Is murder a genetic trait?


Murder is maybe a bad example. There might be benefits in the short term to murdering your companions but in the long term it's not good for a species!
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I dunno, it's worked pretty well for us.




Alkso think backwards!

the change comes before the thing it's selected for :p (as opposed to being changed in response to the event like you'd think with a "design")
 
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Lydzor said:
Which brings up an interesting point. Are we cheating the natural system with our use of medicine? Of course evolution will continue regardless, but there will be generations which aren't considered the fittest passing on their genes. Would a murderer be considered the fittest? I know this is mostly philosophical.
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Survival of the fittest shouldn't be taken as a statement of principle (i.e. the fittest should survive); it's more a statement of fact (i.e. the fittest tend to survive). There is no natural system that we are perverting because nature doesn't have any agency or a plan of any sort.

If nature did intend the fittest to survive, it would have made dinosaurs asteroid-proof.

Art said:
Murder is maybe a bad example. There might be benefits in the short term to murdering your companions but in the long term it's not good for a species!
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Not good for a society, you mean.
 
I should really focus on what I meant by a murderer as an example. I really don't think being a murderer is genetic. But I imagine it as being a rather crude version of beating the competition, although evolution does it in a different way. A psychotic murderer could pass down mental issues through children however, although realistically it's not as simple as this as those mental issues will be unlikely to manifest in the same way for everyone.
 
The DNA structure is amazingly adaptive and has the ability to express differences within the foetal stage in response to environmental factors. So random mutation may be part of evolutions path, but I expect intentional gene expression change is just important.
 
Lydzor said:
I should really focus on what I meant by a murderer as an example. I really don't think being a murderer is genetic. But I imagine it as being a rather crude version of beating the competition, although evolution does it in a different way. A psychotic murderer could pass down mental issues through children however, although realistically it's not as simple as this as those mental issues will be unlikely to manifest in the same way for everyone.
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psychotic people don't tend to live functional lives though, i.e your psychotic murder is more likely to be killed/confined before he breeds.
 
Correct definitions of evolution by natural selection can be found above, but I simply have to say that 'survival of the fittest' has absolutely zero to do with it. The aforementioned term was coined by Herbert Spencer and he was a social Darwinist. It was, and continues to be, a term used by some to extend the biological implications of evolution into the social sphere, but those that do so almost always have a prior agenda, as 'survival of the fittest' has absolutely nothing to do with the biological theory of evolution.
 
What about height?
Over the last 200 years we have gotten taller, is that down to improved diets? If you took a white English man and gave him the diet of 200 years ago, would he grow smaller?
 
Tefal said:
I dunno, it's worked pretty well for us.
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Yeah, but we're not all compulsive murderers. If it was a genetically controlled thing which was purely beneficial you'd expect it to be far more frequent. In nature members of the same species who live near each other aren't constantly murdering each other. Sure, they shout and posture and threat but physical violence doesn't always end with death, a lot of the time one side backs down when it realises it's on the losing end. The risk of being seriously injured in a deathmatch is fairly high and a lot of things don't seem to risk it unless there is something genuinely at stake: they're not compulsive murderers which take every opportunity to bump off the competition. You might win one fight but if you're even slightly injured that'll put you at a major disadvantage when the next challenger comes along.

TJM said:
Not good for a society, you mean.
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I think it really depends on the context and circumstances we're talking here. Apart from what I said above, taken to an extreme it wouldn't be good for a species. Aside from anything else if you compulsively murder everyone who isn't related to you then eventually you'll just end up with scattered, very small populations who are inbred because they murder anyone not closely related to them.
 
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If evolution is purely survival of the fittest I don't really understand why man is continuing to evolve. Admittedly we still lose a lot of people to disease and famine in the third world but would it be fair to say in first world countries that survival of the fittest doesn't really apply anymore? A person born taller or more physically able than another is not really any more likely to succeed and surive.

On that basis why is humanity as a whole continuing to evolve? We're still getting taller for example. Is that just superior nutrition or something?
 
because of reproductive pressure. Essentially it's all about passing on genes. If you're taller, or better looking then you're more likely to attract a good mate which will allow you to have healthy children and pass on your genes.
 
Tefal said:
psychotic people don't tend to live functional lives though, i.e your psychotic murder is more likely to be killed/confined before he breeds.
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That depends on the environment they are born into.

A psychotic born into a rich family will probably be a success in modern society and breed - their total lack of empathy for other human beings can actually be an asset (keep this in mind the next time some CEO is bleating about how hard it was to lay off hundreds of people to increase their profit margin). One born into poverty will end up in prison.

QlimaxUK said:
a better question would be, are we now unevolving (going backwards)? if so how and why?
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There is no backwards or forwards in evolutionary terms - such terms suggest it is moving towards something, which it isn't. It's random.
 
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