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Humans are beyond evolution. There's no meaningful selection pressure in our environment that kills people before reproductive age, so there's no reward for ada

Humans are beyond evolution. There's no meaningful selection pressure in our environment that kills people before reproductive age, so there's no reward for adaptations.

mattigames 2y ago
I have always considered that a bug, not a feature.
svara 2y ago
Totally wrong, killing humans is not required for evolution. Ignoring genetic drift and taking into account only natural selection, all that's needed is differences in fitness, i.e. differences in how much an individual contributes to the gene pool of future generations.
- hammock 2y ago
  This. “Natural selection” refers to selection and survivability of traits, not of individuals. Evolution is how that selection process then manifests itself over time in a population.
  - Galaxeblaffer 2y ago
    can't remember where i read this, but significant and big leaps in evolution seem to often happen in times of crisis when the environment forces it. that's not to say that evolution doesn't happen all the time with little pressure it's just very slow when things are more stable. by extension big leaps in evolution can really be down to a low number of individuals. read an article about a genetic study claiming the human population was down to a few thousand individuals around 90k years ago.
    - quesera 2y ago
      Punctuated equilibrium. Not sure if he's the originator, but I'm pretty sure I learned about it in a Richard Dawkins book.
    - pfannkuchen 2y ago
      Crisis presumably doesn’t affect the rate of mutation, so is the mechanism here just that there is a tight filter that from the perspective of future animals made the species more like themselves, because by definition the future animals have passed the filter? Like the traits must have already been present in some lower frequency pre crisis, and the crisis distills the traits which are selected for by the crisis. So probably less evolution moves faster during crisis and more that there is an interesting survivorship bias related to crisis when analyzing the change of a species over time.
      - thaumasiotes 2y ago
        Well... Evolution is not primarily driven by the mutation rate. It's primarily driven by differential success of already-existing genetic variation. Over the very, very long term, you need mutation to be the source of that genetic variation, but over the short term mutation is mostly just harmful, and this: > Like the traits must have already been present in some lower frequency pre crisis, and the crisis distills the traits which are selected for by the crisis. is correct. > So probably less evolution moves faster during crisis and more that there is an interesting survivorship bias related to crisis when analyzing the change of a species over time. This is conceptually wrong; in this context "survivorship bias" bears a technical name you've probably heard of, "natural selection". A stronger survivorship bias means faster evolution.
    - hammock 2y ago
      That all seems logical. What is the connection to the previous point?
      - Galaxeblaffer 2y ago
        I think i misread your comment a bit. i thought you where making the point that evolution was only about mutations on a large scale and that individuals doesn't really matter. But what you are writing is true even though populations can become very small where these small populations that survive have sometimes been selected for because of traits that mutated in a larger population earlier. Sometimes though it's just the lucky ones that weren't in the wrong spot at the wrong time.
        hammock 2y ago
        No no yeah that might explain why I attracted some other weird comments as well. I only mean, natural selection is the survivability of e.g. a nose shape trait across generations, which can happen via reproduction, early death, etc and it’s not about survivability of the person WITH the nose except to the extent that facilitates the former Survival of the fittest traits
- mattigames 2y ago
  People is taking the parent comment literally but that was very clearly not the intent, obviously human evolution in the stricly technical biological sense its still happening (e.g. genetic diversity) but is by far currently molded by changes done by humanity itself (e.g. industralization, tech) not by factors outside their control as it happens with every other animal on earth, and as it adapts to the environment of its own creation it also loses the traits that favor surviving outside of such an environemnt (e.g. in case of disaster and we lose some of that environment, like a nuclear holocaust) There are ways we could avoid losing most of that survivability but of course they are wildly unpopular such as actively discourage people with terrible inheritable diseases to procreate (e.g. ALS, Lupus), favor reproduction of people with both higher intelligence and physical skills (e.g. goverment subsidies for their parents, tied to their children grades and general well being)
washadjeffmad 2y ago
Interesting. So how do you explain menopause and other population or age scale adaptations? Humans aren't individuals, no matter how certain blips of modern culturalism pretend.
snarf21 2y ago
Really? I was under the understanding that we have continued to get taller and bigger driven by out our access to nutrition and medicine over the last couple of centuries.
- InfiniteLoup 2y ago
  Is this really a genetic adaptation to the environment or rather fulfilling the inherent growth potential that would otherwise be inhibited by nutrient deficiency?
  - _DeadFred_ 2y ago
    By all the 'no one under 6'2"' tinder jokes I'd say it's being incorporated into genetics.
swalling 2y ago
Dead wrong. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recent_human_evolution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recent_human_evolution
ninetyninenine 2y ago
There is incredibly high sexual selection. Birth control is effecting this. Note that sexual selection selects for health, wealth and reputation. Women are doing most of the selection here.
- SamBam 2y ago
  Evidence? Take just the easiest to measure of those factors, wealth. Per your hypothesis, wealthier men should have more babies. Do you have any evidence that wealthier men have more babies? In fact, it's quite the opposite. There is a strong inverse correlation between wealth and number of babies. Both globally [1] and in the US [2]. There is some data that you can seek out that will suggest the trend is reversed in some first-world countries in the past couple of years, but that's no where near enough time to draw conclusions. Is there real evidence that men with greater "health" (besides the obvious, of, say, having a crippling disease) or "reputation" have more children? I'm sorry, but this sounds like "women only chose alpha males" junk to me. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_and_fertility https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_and_fertility 2. https://www.statista.com/statistics/241530/birth-rate-by-family-income-in-the-us/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/241530/birth-rate-by-fam...
  - ninetyninenine 2y ago
    Per my hypothesis I never said wealthier men should have more babies. Birth control is a factor here. Women do marry and prefer richer men. Hypergamy is scientifically true, you can look it up if you want. But birth control changes the outcome even though hypergamy is an influencing factor. In addition I said health and reputation are factors. So a man with good health but low wealth has one positive factor in his favor. I feel your entire reply is rude and over the top. Calling my statement junk is not conducive to discussion.
    - SamBam 2y ago
      Ok, fair enough, I didn't mean to be rude. It's just that it sounds a lot like stuff that people who push fairly sexist stuff say. The thread is about evolution, and sexual selection in the context of evolution generally implies having an evolutionary fitness. I missed the part about birth control, since then we're not really talking about whether sexual selection is having a role in human evolution. In the context of sexual selection affecting evolutionary fitness, it seems clear that there is an inverse relationship between wealth and number of offspring. I am not sure if there are any scientific studies purporting to link "reputation" and either marriage or offspring. Do you know of any?
dekhn 2y ago
I believe we are currently measuring recent functional selection on humans and it's non-zero. That is, empirically you are incorrect.
red-iron-pine 2y ago
no one is having babies mon ami. birth rates are declining. it's not about killing people before reproductive age, it's about absolute numbers of offspring born. dying before reproducing ensures that number stays 0, but you can still hit sexual maturity and not reproduce. plus there is a fertility window -- after 50 most humans, male or female, ain't having kids (a handful of rockstar types whelping babies at 80 notwithstanding). there is a TON of meaningful pressure in our environment, like the inability to have a living wage reducing how many Gen Z's are marrying and having kids.
- thaumasiotes 2y ago
  > it's not about killing people before reproductive age, it's about absolute numbers of offspring born. Technically, it's about averaging offspring (weighted by your genetic contribution to them) across all of time. If you have 30 children, and all of them starve to death before reproducing, you've reproduced less than your neighbor with the one child and one grandchild. But that's impossible to calculate, so mostly we just have to work with number of children. This detail, though, is something you might want to keep in mind when looking at reports of "effective population" in the past. Any actual population in the far past who end up being wiped out in the middle past are excluded from the "effective population" that we calculate. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effective_population_size https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effective_population_size
_DeadFred_ 2y ago
That's what the build up of plastics in our testicles are for.
toasterlovin 2y ago
If there's a fertility gradient based on heritable traits then there is evolution happening.
steve_adams_86 2y ago
This simply isn't how evolution works. There's no way to be "beyond" it. It's an inevitable facet of populations of living organisms. If a population used genetic engineering to collectively ensure their genetics didn't change, no mutations, no other populations involved, then... I guess? Otherwise, there is this staggering multitude of influences. Living longer and reproducing longer is a huge weight on the scales of evolution. Why does anyone need to die early for it to work?
immibis 2y ago
Does everyone have two children?
JumpCrisscross 2y ago
> Humans are beyond evolution Empirically false [1]. The median artery is a poignant example from the industrial era [2]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recent_human_evolution#Early_Modern_Period_to_present https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recent_human_evolution#Early_M... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Median_artery https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Median_artery
- s1artibartfast 2y ago
  Interesting article on the median artery given that there is no proposed advantage to the phenotype that is increasing in representation. My understanding is that evolution is specifically directional change in response to a pressure, not random drift or coincidence. Is it accurate to say a trait evolved if the change in prevalence is entirely incidental and tied to a second Factor? Is it accurate to say a trait evolved if the change is a regression to the mean in the absence of pressure? I went looking for papers on why the median artery might be selected for, and one hypothesized that it may be grouped with, fetal deformities, such as spina bifida, which are increasing not because they are advantageous, but because adverse selection pressures are diminished. Another hypothesis is that the variation in median artery is not reflective of a change in genome, but change in environmentally triggered gene expression associated with maternal health.
  - JumpCrisscross 2y ago
    > one hypothesized that it may be grouped with, fetal deformities, such as spina bifida, which are increasing not because they are advantageous, but because adverse selection pressures are diminished Nobody seems to have studied the effects of a persistent median artery on dexterity (important amidst increasing literacy and now phone/computer use) or forearm circumference (looks hot).
    - s1artibartfast 2y ago
      Dexterity would be an interesting one. Whatever it is (direct or associated) must be a strong force to triple the prevalence in 150 years or so. Thats like 15% growth each 20-year generation, which would be a huge difference in reproductive success. I think this puts a pretty strong indicator that it's not a genome shift but something else
JumpCrisscross 2y ago
> There's no meaningful selection pressure in our environment that kills people before reproductive age War and disease. Rich countries can afford defence and healthcare. Poor countries cannot. (Within rich countries, the kids of the rich see war and disease less. They're more likely to be in offices, not on the battlefield and they're more likely to be educated and vaccinated.) And even rich countries have periodic selection pressures. Natural disasters. Pandemics. Addiction epidemics. Propensities towards violent altercations or risk-taking behaviour. (Exhibit A: young men in cars.)

Humans are beyond evolution. There's no meaningful selection pressure in our environment that kills people before reproductive age, so there's no reward for adaptations.

mattigames 2y ago

I have always considered that a bug, not a feature.

svara 2y ago

Totally wrong, killing humans is not required for evolution. Ignoring genetic drift and taking into account only natural selection, all that's needed is differences in fitness, i.e. differences in how much an individual contributes to the gene pool of future generations.

hammock 2y ago
This. “Natural selection” refers to selection and survivability of traits, not of individuals. Evolution is how that selection process then manifests itself over time in a population.
- Galaxeblaffer 2y ago
  can't remember where i read this, but significant and big leaps in evolution seem to often happen in times of crisis when the environment forces it. that's not to say that evolution doesn't happen all the time with little pressure it's just very slow when things are more stable. by extension big leaps in evolution can really be down to a low number of individuals. read an article about a genetic study claiming the human population was down to a few thousand individuals around 90k years ago.
  - quesera 2y ago
    Punctuated equilibrium. Not sure if he's the originator, but I'm pretty sure I learned about it in a Richard Dawkins book.
  - pfannkuchen 2y ago
    Crisis presumably doesn’t affect the rate of mutation, so is the mechanism here just that there is a tight filter that from the perspective of future animals made the species more like themselves, because by definition the future animals have passed the filter? Like the traits must have already been present in some lower frequency pre crisis, and the crisis distills the traits which are selected for by the crisis. So probably less evolution moves faster during crisis and more that there is an interesting survivorship bias related to crisis when analyzing the change of a species over time.
    - thaumasiotes 2y ago
      Well... Evolution is not primarily driven by the mutation rate. It's primarily driven by differential success of already-existing genetic variation. Over the very, very long term, you need mutation to be the source of that genetic variation, but over the short term mutation is mostly just harmful, and this: > Like the traits must have already been present in some lower frequency pre crisis, and the crisis distills the traits which are selected for by the crisis. is correct. > So probably less evolution moves faster during crisis and more that there is an interesting survivorship bias related to crisis when analyzing the change of a species over time. This is conceptually wrong; in this context "survivorship bias" bears a technical name you've probably heard of, "natural selection". A stronger survivorship bias means faster evolution.
  - hammock 2y ago
    That all seems logical. What is the connection to the previous point?
    - Galaxeblaffer 2y ago
      I think i misread your comment a bit. i thought you where making the point that evolution was only about mutations on a large scale and that individuals doesn't really matter. But what you are writing is true even though populations can become very small where these small populations that survive have sometimes been selected for because of traits that mutated in a larger population earlier. Sometimes though it's just the lucky ones that weren't in the wrong spot at the wrong time.
      - hammock 2y ago
        No no yeah that might explain why I attracted some other weird comments as well. I only mean, natural selection is the survivability of e.g. a nose shape trait across generations, which can happen via reproduction, early death, etc and it’s not about survivability of the person WITH the nose except to the extent that facilitates the former Survival of the fittest traits
mattigames 2y ago
People is taking the parent comment literally but that was very clearly not the intent, obviously human evolution in the stricly technical biological sense its still happening (e.g. genetic diversity) but is by far currently molded by changes done by humanity itself (e.g. industralization, tech) not by factors outside their control as it happens with every other animal on earth, and as it adapts to the environment of its own creation it also loses the traits that favor surviving outside of such an environemnt (e.g. in case of disaster and we lose some of that environment, like a nuclear holocaust) There are ways we could avoid losing most of that survivability but of course they are wildly unpopular such as actively discourage people with terrible inheritable diseases to procreate (e.g. ALS, Lupus), favor reproduction of people with both higher intelligence and physical skills (e.g. goverment subsidies for their parents, tied to their children grades and general well being)

washadjeffmad 2y ago

Interesting. So how do you explain menopause and other population or age scale adaptations? Humans aren't individuals, no matter how certain blips of modern culturalism pretend.

snarf21 2y ago

Really? I was under the understanding that we have continued to get taller and bigger driven by out our access to nutrition and medicine over the last couple of centuries.

InfiniteLoup 2y ago
Is this really a genetic adaptation to the environment or rather fulfilling the inherent growth potential that would otherwise be inhibited by nutrient deficiency?
- _DeadFred_ 2y ago
  By all the 'no one under 6'2"' tinder jokes I'd say it's being incorporated into genetics.

swalling 2y ago

Dead wrong. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recent_human_evolution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recent_human_evolution

ninetyninenine 2y ago

There is incredibly high sexual selection. Birth control is effecting this. Note that sexual selection selects for health, wealth and reputation. Women are doing most of the selection here.

SamBam 2y ago
Evidence? Take just the easiest to measure of those factors, wealth. Per your hypothesis, wealthier men should have more babies. Do you have any evidence that wealthier men have more babies? In fact, it's quite the opposite. There is a strong inverse correlation between wealth and number of babies. Both globally [1] and in the US [2]. There is some data that you can seek out that will suggest the trend is reversed in some first-world countries in the past couple of years, but that's no where near enough time to draw conclusions. Is there real evidence that men with greater "health" (besides the obvious, of, say, having a crippling disease) or "reputation" have more children? I'm sorry, but this sounds like "women only chose alpha males" junk to me. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_and_fertility https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_and_fertility 2. https://www.statista.com/statistics/241530/birth-rate-by-family-income-in-the-us/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/241530/birth-rate-by-fam...
- ninetyninenine 2y ago
  Per my hypothesis I never said wealthier men should have more babies. Birth control is a factor here. Women do marry and prefer richer men. Hypergamy is scientifically true, you can look it up if you want. But birth control changes the outcome even though hypergamy is an influencing factor. In addition I said health and reputation are factors. So a man with good health but low wealth has one positive factor in his favor. I feel your entire reply is rude and over the top. Calling my statement junk is not conducive to discussion.
  - SamBam 2y ago
    Ok, fair enough, I didn't mean to be rude. It's just that it sounds a lot like stuff that people who push fairly sexist stuff say. The thread is about evolution, and sexual selection in the context of evolution generally implies having an evolutionary fitness. I missed the part about birth control, since then we're not really talking about whether sexual selection is having a role in human evolution. In the context of sexual selection affecting evolutionary fitness, it seems clear that there is an inverse relationship between wealth and number of offspring. I am not sure if there are any scientific studies purporting to link "reputation" and either marriage or offspring. Do you know of any?

dekhn 2y ago

I believe we are currently measuring recent functional selection on humans and it's non-zero. That is, empirically you are incorrect.

red-iron-pine 2y ago

no one is having babies mon ami. birth rates are declining. it's not about killing people before reproductive age, it's about absolute numbers of offspring born. dying before reproducing ensures that number stays 0, but you can still hit sexual maturity and not reproduce. plus there is a fertility window -- after 50 most humans, male or female, ain't having kids (a handful of rockstar types whelping babies at 80 notwithstanding). there is a TON of meaningful pressure in our environment, like the inability to have a living wage reducing how many Gen Z's are marrying and having kids.

thaumasiotes 2y ago
> it's not about killing people before reproductive age, it's about absolute numbers of offspring born. Technically, it's about averaging offspring (weighted by your genetic contribution to them) across all of time. If you have 30 children, and all of them starve to death before reproducing, you've reproduced less than your neighbor with the one child and one grandchild. But that's impossible to calculate, so mostly we just have to work with number of children. This detail, though, is something you might want to keep in mind when looking at reports of "effective population" in the past. Any actual population in the far past who end up being wiped out in the middle past are excluded from the "effective population" that we calculate. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effective_population_size https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effective_population_size

_DeadFred_ 2y ago

That's what the build up of plastics in our testicles are for.

toasterlovin 2y ago

If there's a fertility gradient based on heritable traits then there is evolution happening.

steve_adams_86 2y ago

This simply isn't how evolution works. There's no way to be "beyond" it. It's an inevitable facet of populations of living organisms. If a population used genetic engineering to collectively ensure their genetics didn't change, no mutations, no other populations involved, then... I guess? Otherwise, there is this staggering multitude of influences. Living longer and reproducing longer is a huge weight on the scales of evolution. Why does anyone need to die early for it to work?

immibis 2y ago

Does everyone have two children?

JumpCrisscross 2y ago

> Humans are beyond evolution Empirically false [1]. The median artery is a poignant example from the industrial era [2]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recent_human_evolution#Early_Modern_Period_to_present https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recent_human_evolution#Early_M... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Median_artery https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Median_artery

s1artibartfast 2y ago
Interesting article on the median artery given that there is no proposed advantage to the phenotype that is increasing in representation. My understanding is that evolution is specifically directional change in response to a pressure, not random drift or coincidence. Is it accurate to say a trait evolved if the change in prevalence is entirely incidental and tied to a second Factor? Is it accurate to say a trait evolved if the change is a regression to the mean in the absence of pressure? I went looking for papers on why the median artery might be selected for, and one hypothesized that it may be grouped with, fetal deformities, such as spina bifida, which are increasing not because they are advantageous, but because adverse selection pressures are diminished. Another hypothesis is that the variation in median artery is not reflective of a change in genome, but change in environmentally triggered gene expression associated with maternal health.
- JumpCrisscross 2y ago
  > one hypothesized that it may be grouped with, fetal deformities, such as spina bifida, which are increasing not because they are advantageous, but because adverse selection pressures are diminished Nobody seems to have studied the effects of a persistent median artery on dexterity (important amidst increasing literacy and now phone/computer use) or forearm circumference (looks hot).
  - s1artibartfast 2y ago
    Dexterity would be an interesting one. Whatever it is (direct or associated) must be a strong force to triple the prevalence in 150 years or so. Thats like 15% growth each 20-year generation, which would be a huge difference in reproductive success. I think this puts a pretty strong indicator that it's not a genome shift but something else

JumpCrisscross 2y ago

> There's no meaningful selection pressure in our environment that kills people before reproductive age War and disease. Rich countries can afford defence and healthcare. Poor countries cannot. (Within rich countries, the kids of the rich see war and disease less. They're more likely to be in offices, not on the battlefield and they're more likely to be educated and vaccinated.) And even rich countries have periodic selection pressures. Natural disasters. Pandemics. Addiction epidemics. Propensities towards violent altercations or risk-taking behaviour. (Exhibit A: young men in cars.)