4 ms·
Humans are evolving right before our eyes, everywhere, always. Still an interesting article, though!
by spacemark 2y ago
Humans are evolving right before our eyes, everywhere, always.
Still an interesting article, though!
- dash2 2y agoYup (blowing my own trumpet): https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10519-022-10107-w?1 https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10519-022-10107-w...
- Mistletoe 2y agoI wonder what evolutionary pressures are working on modern humans right now and how they will shape the future?
- com 2y agoJohn Hawks, a paleoanthropologist, regularly makes the point [0] that human evolution has accelerated enormously in the last 50k years. Lactase metabolism is new, in the last 19k years. European skin colours and blue eyes appear to be very recent too, maybe 3.5k years. Almost certainly there are all kinds of super interesting human evolutionary changes that are occurring now, with our huge population that won’t be visible for thousands of years… [0] at least since this https://johnhawks.net/weblog/our-new-paper-on-why-human-evolution-accelerated/ https://johnhawks.net/weblog/our-new-paper-on-why-human-evol...
- yard2010 2y agoThis makes me sad every time - I know for a fact that mountains are evolving, but in my lifetime the mountains are just mountains. Still. Not changing a bit unless I'm looking really really close (which means that it's not the mountain that changes, but merely its surface).. So the same with humans. I don't care about living forever, I just want to see what happens in 10k years. Just out of curiosity.
- dwaltrip 2y agoThere’s a really great sci fi book that touches on this, I’m blanking on the name. They can “bobble” up regions of space which basically freezes time for a duration in that region. Highly recommend.
- MichaelZuo 2y agoI’ve heard human jaw muscles are becoming smaller and weaker as there’s less need to chew for prolonged periods of time.
- abyssin 2y agoBut is there an evolutionary pressure in this direction because of the decrease in need? That would be Lamarckian then. I wonder if certain traits need evolutionary pressure to stay stable, and otherwise degenerate in some specific direction.
- jkrems 2y agoMany (most?) traits require energy to develop and maintain. A stronger muscle will need more energy so there's always pressure to reduce it. That pressure may just be countered by pressures in other directions.
- Y_Y 2y agoSomething something opportunity cost? If you can allocate your next bit of energy and protein to something with better bag-for-buck than a jaw muscle then that should be an evolutionary advantage.
- actionfromafar 2y agoWhat is better bang for buck? Pretty small buck too.
- Y_Y 2y agoMore expected (over ensemble of specimens) evolutionary "fitness" per unit of whatever you need to expend to make a jaw muscle a bit stronger. The buck is small because we're doing optimization calculus.
- Ekaros 2y agoOne thing to consider is that some things might not be genetic, but environmental. I think jaw muscles are one such thing and short-sightedness might be other. First caused by food we eat and the other by less natural light and less time spend outside in childhood. I think there might be more of these effects.
- swatcoder 2y agoAmong them, eventually, will be modern medicine if we manage to preserve it long enough and share it widely enough. By suppressing the consequence of genetic predispositions and vulnerabilities, it lets those genes propagate more freely and invisibly than they would have been doing before. It helps individuals and communities today in a way we can't possibly refuse, but sets up the species to become perpetually dependent on an elaborate, brittle medical infrastructure. Genetic engineering and eugenics could eventually address that, but those invite scifi horrors of their own. We seem to have set ourselves into a bit of a trap.
- fallingknife 2y agoThs "scifi horrors" of genetic engineering are entirely made up. Those things just aren't profitable, so they won't get done.
- gruez 2y ago>but sets up the species to become perpetually dependent on an elaborate, brittle medical infrastructure How is this any different than the transition from hunter-gatherers to agriculture caused us to "become perpetually dependent on an elaborate, brittle agricultural infrastructure"?
- swatcoder 2y agoOnly in scale and intensity. Agriculture took hold in numerous civilizations and indeed introduced one of the primary threats of collapse for those civilizations. Throughout history, we can see civilizations collapse when their dependence on agriculture faltered, which happened often enough. But neither the technology (agriculture) nor its failures (blight, famine, etc) were universal and so it hadn't become a threat to the species as a whole. Modernity, however, has become aggressively global and more successfully universalizing. We not only invite every community into it, we insist they do so for their own good. Further, its technological contrivances (and therefore their brittleness) are more intense because of industrialization and later accelerating technology. As it continues to progress and expand, it brings the whole species into its gamble and raises the stakes of that gamble at the same time.
- carapace 2y agoThe primary "pressure" at the moment is to develop species-level self awareness to stabilize the planetary life support system before we crash civilization.
- nickdothutton 2y agoAbility to write good dating profiles which appeal to the algorithm.
- saalweachter 2y agoThe biggest thing we're doing now is accumulating a huge amount of genetic diversity, full of all sorts of novel mutations and interesting admixtures. It's hard to know what genes or traits will be advantageous over the next centuries. The biggest place where our technological advantage still has large gaps that our biology can compensate is disease, and there it's almost random -- a gene that results in a novel protein which is normally advantageous or disadvantageous might have the opposite effect if it makes you exceptionally vulnerable or resistant to a new disease.
- hn_throwaway_99 2y agoIf you look at the complete collapse of fertility rates in the developed world, that is probably the strongest evolutionary pressure humans have faced for millennia. It is a bit weird to me that the scientific press doesn't talk more about how evolutionary pressure applies here. I think that people are wary to talk about this because it can end up sounding like social Darwinism, or that they believe "Idiocracy" was a scientific documentary. But it's inescapable, for example, that education rates are now strongly negatively correlated with fertility. While "level of education" is obviously not inherited genetically, I don't think it's too much of a stretch to hypothesize that genetic factors play a role in someone's educational attainment. And, currently, the more education you get, the less likely you are to reproduce (statistically, of course). Sex evolved to feel really good because for most of human history having sex would usually, eventually lead to babies. Reliable birth control has fundamentally broken that link. Similarly, when a major factor preventing you from reproducing was starving to death, being smarter or cleverer was an evolutionary advantage. I'd argue that advantage no longer exists. Another simple anecdote: I recently went to my uncle's funeral, and his family was very religious (Catholic). My father, on the other hand, rejected religion and raised us all atheists. My father has 6 descendants, my uncle 24. Again, "religiosity" is not a genetically inherited trait, but I think it would be foolish to believe genetic predisposition plays 0 role. I say all this just to highlight that, eventually, the "collapse in birthrates" will take care of itself - people with a strong desire and ability to procreate will outcompete, at least in terms of offspring survival, their peers. This will have a huge, profound effect on world society that most academics are too scared to talk about.
- soperj 2y ago> But it's inescapable, for example, that education rates are now strongly negatively correlated with fertility. You can easily say that city dwelling is strongly correlated with higher education rates, and higher noise pollution, therefore high noise pollution is strongly negatively correlated with fertility. Correlation doesn't equal causation. > Reliable birth control has fundamentally broken that link. Reliable birth control has severely reduced unwanted pregnancy, but there's a whole host of people who would like to have children that can't.
- 2y ago
- nonameiguess 2y agoWhite skin will probably go away in a few thousand years or so. It likely only ever appeared to absorb more UV light and synthesize vitamin D at low sun angles while mostly covered in heavy clothing. Since we can now supplement vitamin D, all the other disadvantages should make it maladaptive.
- jl6 2y agoThousands of years? It’s much more likely that gene editing technology will make skin-color-swaps a routine recreational activity.
- Ekaros 2y agoI could see plastics, chemicals, for-ever chemicals and in general various pollutants leading various pressures on reproduction. So on medium term there could be pressure for genetics that handle those better.
- solardev 2y agoOur grandkids will have giant thumbs and tiny brains...
- johannes1234321 2y agoOnly if giant thumbs are useful in using tinder to reproduce more.