Next Evolution

Water Cooler
#1

Sooo, maybe homo sapiens are not getting dumber. Maybe we are engineering ourselves into entirely different species?

http://discovermagazine.com/2013/march/13-evolution-full-tilt

Evolution is like a search engine, though not a very good one. We’re not talking Google. We might be talking Google drunk, blindfolded, on crutches, and with a frontal lobotomy.

This is why the Nobel laureate François Jacob described evolution as a tinkerer, not an engineer. Engineers know where they’re going—they have an aim, a plan. Tinkerers are just fastening parts together, sticking this bit onto that in an ongoing exploration of functional possibilities, with no goal in mind

Fogel’s core idea, which he calls techno-physio evolution and explains in depth in his 2011 book, The Changing Body (cowritten with Roderick Floud, Bernard Harris, and Sok Chul Hong), is fairly straightforward: “The health and nutrition of one generation contributes, through mothers and through infant and childhood experience, to the strength, health, and longevity of the next generation; at the same time, increased health and longevity enable the members of that next generation to work harder and longer and to create resources which can then be used, in turn, to assist the next, and succeeding, generations to prosper.” In short, technology is impacting genetics.

These notions are not entirely new. Economists have known for almost 100 years of a correlation among height, income, and longevity. What had not been properly explained was the mechanism. That explanation came later, with the burgeoning new field of epigenetics—the study of how the external environment can alter our genes throughout life, and even be passed on to future generations. Today researchers in this well-established field have shown that natural selection is not the only force producing heritable change.

Fogel, though, goes further by going faster. “It’s a whole-is-much-greater-than-the-sum-of-its-parts argument,” he explains. “We’re talking about an incredible synergy between technology and biology, about very simple improvements—pasteurization, a general reduction of pollutants, cleaning up our water supply—producing heritable effects across populations faster than ever before.

Think about this: Humans are a 200,000-year-old species. When we first emerged our life span was 20 years. By the turn of the 20th century it had become 44 years. We advanced by 24 years over the course of 200,000 years. But today, it’s 80 years. These simple improvements doubled our longevity in a century.”

#2

Technology impacting genetics? Perhaps in allowing weaker folks to procreate and dilute the pool. Eating better and better materernal health will make kids taller but not due to genetic change.

#3

I think evolution may proceed by lines of class rather than geography. In a way, we already have a way to increase intelligence - elite universities, where intelligent men and women meet each other and procreate, clearly stratifying this trait by class, which is self-perpetuating, and that could be where we see different subspecies arise.

#4

Google epigenetics. For example:

In the Överkalix study, Marcus Pembrey and colleagues observed that the paternal (but not maternal) grandsons[102] of Swedish men who were exposed during preadolescence to famine in the 19th century were less likely to die of cardiovascular disease. If food was plentiful, then diabetes mortality in the grandchildren increased, suggesting that this was a transgenerational epigenetic inheritance.[103] The opposite effect was observed for females—the paternal (but not maternal) granddaughters of women who experienced famine while in the womb (and therefore while their eggs were being formed) lived shorter lives on average.[104]

So, in other words exposure to the famine led to different expressions of their grandchildren’s DNA. That’s a major environmental event having genetic impacts a whole generation removed. Now, think about how much we engineer and change our environment. By changing our environment we are likely changing our genes.

#5

From the article:

“a Great Dane and a Chihuahua could not produce offspring without help”

Indeed

#6

This is a fascinating subject. I actually watched a ted talk last night that discussed this topic. Some notable topics included stem cells and four chemicals to reconstruct, in essence allowing you to create any body part. Furthermore, Ed Boyden’s contribution of being able to map out and reconstruct memory. Beyond our direct impact on the future of our species, an argument is being made that we are evolving indirectly. As humans, we take in and process data amounts far beyond what our ancestors did. This is one theory behind the increasing rates of downs syndrome. Many more topics discussed too, have a listen.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Syi9bqfFIdY

#7

Remember that the presence of technology and social conventions also changes the environment, i.e. what evolution adapts us to. Breaks happen when the environment changes and what was well adapted to one environment is now maladapted to the new one.

Humans are one of the few species that substantially change their envioronments such that the dangers of the natural wild become almost forgettable. The others that come close are social insects like ants and bees, and, to a lesser extent, some burrowing animals like rodents and some snakes.

Most modern people are extremely poorly adapted to survive in the pleistocene if transported there as adults. But if you grabbed a pleistocene adult, it’s not clear that they would do very well in a Kansas suburb. As for children, presumably a modern person could learn a lot of behaviors that are useful in the pleistocene and vice versa. The pleistocene child in the modern world would probably have better eyesight and perhaps better immunities, but also might be overly aggressive to survive in a modern technological world.

#8

Different traits result in accumulation of resources now.

#9

We are the borg. resistance is futile.

#10

Well yeah, all animals are always evolving into a new species. Nothing stands still, no different for homo sapiens.

If we look at history a change in environment tends to drive it. Our environment has changed (offices, tech, etc) and our diet (sugar, HFCS, white flour, grain/seed oils, GMOs, less meat, less veggie). That causes a period of ungraceful transition (metabolic syndrome and decreased intelligence). And then either adaptation or extinction happens, eventually.

But a new species isn’t necessarily an improvement (which this article assumes), it’s just something different; an experiment by nature to find something more suited to the environment.

Okay, but on this part nobody actually believes human life span genetic potential changed. Life span was the same in the Upper Paleolithic as it is today, but you had more infant mortality, child mortality, death by infection, exposure to outdoors back then. Today you just have people reaching their genetic potential. That’s cool, but it’s not evolution.

Sorry, but the other parts of that article were bullshit too, like height. Height has only recently reclaimed 20K BC levels. It’s like a Bloomberg article where they tell everyone “the US market has a magic shield which protects it from global instability”, of course people want to hear that. “Print it!!”.

#11

Well I know what you are saying, but if continued for thousands of generations it might…

Eating better from birth helps kids reach their current genetic potential, if continued for 50K years it potentially changes that potential.

#12

One has to seperate Lamarckian vs Darwinian evolution when having these conversations.

Also:

Humanity may split into two sub-species in 100,000 years’ time as predicted by HG Wells, an expert has said.

Evolutionary theorist Oliver Curry of the London School of Economics expects a genetic upper class and a dim-witted underclass to emerge.

The human race would peak in the year 3000, he said - before a decline due to dependence on technology.

People would become choosier about their sexual partners, causing humanity to divide into sub-species, he added.

The descendants of the genetic upper class would be tall, slim, healthy, attractive, intelligent, and creative and a far cry from the “underclass” humans who would have evolved into dim-witted, ugly, squat goblin-like creatures.

Source: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/6057734.stm

#13

The below is what I think a lot of people are missing (epigenetics). The environment changes the expression of your genome and produces heritable traits that are different. The heritable traits you pass down to your child is not pre-determined by your DNA at birth; a substantial portion is influenced by the environment. This is different from what many of you learned in HS bio, but it is correct. Thus, the more rapidly we change our environment the more rapidly we may evolve (or devolve, as some see it).

Humans have changed their environments more in the last 100 years than any animal we know of has done in history. Now, we’ve mapped the genome. Natural selection isn’t “natural” as we think of it anymore, and it is going to become even less so.

“very simple improvements—pasteurization, a general reduction of pollutants, cleaning up our water supply— producing heritable effects across populations faster than ever before.”

#14

This reminded me of a quote from a book I’m reading:

“The entire history of humanity is marked by a single inexorable movement - from animal instinct toward rational thought, from inborn behavior toward acquired knowledge. A half-grown panther abandoned in the wilderness will grow up to be a perfectly normal panther. But a half-grown child similarly abandoned will grow up into an unrecognizable savage, unfit for normal society. Yet there are those who insist the opposite: that we are creatures of instinct, like wolves.”

― Philipp Meyer, The Son

#15

Decreased intelligence? I doubt it. Maybe for some, but not on the aggregate.

#16

I’m going to evolve X-Men style.

#17

Discussed on the other thread. This cheesy article has “increased brain size” in the graphic, yet doesn’t back that up. In reality brain size has decreased 10% in the last 10K years. That and other points of data, and lines or reasoning, point to humans getting stupider since the Neolithic. Plenty of people who study this stuff agree it is probably happening, it’s not some crazy theory.

#18

Uhh, so this is the sort of thing I simply don’t get. We all know that changes to the environment can lead to changes in the animal (various theories on how that happens), I think we all get that. But what is the obsession with “improvements” ; thinking these changes to the environment using technology are going to lead to positive changes in the animal? A change in the environment is by definition something new, often meaning something the animal is not yet adapted to.

Let’s do pasteurization. Sapiens are not yet fully adapted to dairy, we only started that 6K years ago. Adaption to dairy varies by latitude, with Northerns generally more adapted, and people along the equator less so. You take a food that sapiens are not yet adapted to, and you change it with industrial revolution techniques into a food they are EVEN LESS adapted to, and this is passed off as “an improvement”? Many would say no tech, raw milk from healthy cows, is better, or even better zero dairy.

http://www.nbb.cornell.edu/neurobio/BioNB427/Readings/BloomShermanMS.pdf

We have reduced pollutants? We have cleaned up our water supply by adding chemicals to it? What??

#19

I wouldn’t say no dairy is better. While some humans aren’t adapted to dairy, the western world (Indo-Europeans) are adapted, and can yield benefits, like increases in height, thanks to all that IGF and other hormones in milk.

#20

Growing a second vagina?