3 ms·
Unfortunately, this is not how it works. Two reasons: - Firstly, our culture changes so rapidly that evolutionary timescales become entirely irrelevant to it.
by jeremysmyth 13y ago
Unfortunately, this is not how it works. Two reasons:
- Firstly, our culture changes so rapidly that evolutionary timescales become entirely irrelevant to it. The various cultural changes since suffragetism, and the various civil rights marches, the legislation that comes after the leading wave of equality but comes before the general public social changes, all of these things have happened since then, at a rate of more than one significant change per generation. This, in evolutionary terms, is an eyeblink. Gender equality is, as a concept in the western world, less than a hundred years old. Four generations is nothing, even in labs that study mutations and evolution in an accelerated way.
- Humans have something like 90-95% infant survival now. Evolutionary pressures are substantially less than they are in any other species, and less than at any time in our past. Not only are cultural changes irrelevant to genetic changes at our timescales, but they have even less effect than they would have had if we mutated (and died) more often.
So, it's a nice argument, but it has absolutely no merit.