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I think that was my point. You said that ten thousand years of civilization was too short for meaningful evolution. At least that was my understanding.

by weeksie 12y ago

Retric 12y ago
10,000 years is long enough for significant beneficial traits to spread widely. It's not enough time to Change neutral traits that used to be beneficial. That's generally a vary slow change consider most animals don't need dietary vitamin C even if there diets provide plenty of the stuff. However, you used the term "a few generations" as in below 1,000 years and that's rediculusly fast for a species that takes as long as we do to reproduce and have so few children.
- weeksie 12y ago
  I didn't use the term "a few generations", that was another commenter. :) That said, you mentioned a beneficial trait becoming neutral, and that's making the assumption that greater intelligence is neutral. It could be that larger social organizations reward slightly less intelligent critters. That would do the trick rather quickly. I'm not making that claim, but am saying that discussions around evolution and traits that we have bias toward seeing as "good" are fraught. There's also the further issue of intelligence being a very nebulous term that encompasses tons of cognitive traits, which makes any discussion of intelligence in evolutionary terms even more difficult. It's also possible that some of what we call intelligence is epigenetic.
  - Retric 12y ago
    I don't think we have good data on people’s intelligence 10,000 years ago. But, civilization as we think of it only impacted a fairly small chunk of humanity for a relatively small time period. So, at best 'larger social organizations' was rather localized. Just 500 years ago lots of people in North America where living nomadic hunter gather lifestyles. Even just 100 years ago you could find tribes in many parts of the world still living hunter gather lifestyles little changed over the last 15,000+ years and probably similar to how people lived 100,000+ thousand years ago. As to epigenetic factors, the classic hunter gather lifestyle could be very healthy as long as population numbers stayed low. Farming actually lowered many heath indicators even as it allowed for massive increases in population sizes. PS: Anyway, evolution is only 'fast' when there are significant benefits or harms. If a single mutation or environment change increases survival chances by say +/- 1% it takes exponentially longer to spread than a +/- 10% change.
    - lutusp 12y ago
      I gave up on cataloging the many grammatical and spelling errors in this post, but this one stood out for its unintended wit: "Farming actually lowered many heath indicators ..." Indeed, it's uncontroversial that farming degrades the heath.
      - Retric 12y ago
        lol
    - weeksie 12y ago
      I don't disagree with any of those points. My original post just stated that I couldn't imagine any fitness pressure that would be making humans smarter and, if anything, we were probably going in the other direction. My secondary point was that change can happen on short timelines. I do want to mention that larger social organizations were quite widespread in the Americas, despite the existence of hunter-gatherer tribes. The new world certainly wasn't an uncivilized wasteland when Europeans arrived. Epigenetic factors can be triggered buy group size (domestication) as well. So those hunter-gatherer tribes might share the same genetic traits but express them differently based on their environment.
      - Retric 12y ago
        any fitness pressure that would be making humans smarter I don’t recall the study, it was either men in the US or Britton. But, income was positively correlated with number of children. Income and intelligence are also linked so that's evidence that right now intelligence is positively correlated with number of children. This may be strongly linked with prison time but again that links with intelligence. The important thing to note is men often have children with more than one person and can have children vary late in life.

I think that was my point. You said that ten thousand years of civilization was too short for meaningful evolution. At least that was my understanding.

by weeksie 12y ago

I think that was my point. You said that ten thousand years of civilization was too short for meaningful evolution. At least that was my understanding.

Retric 12y ago

10,000 years is long enough for significant beneficial traits to spread widely. It's not enough time to Change neutral traits that used to be beneficial. That's generally a vary slow change consider most animals don't need dietary vitamin C even if there diets provide plenty of the stuff. However, you used the term "a few generations" as in below 1,000 years and that's rediculusly fast for a species that takes as long as we do to reproduce and have so few children.

weeksie 12y ago
I didn't use the term "a few generations", that was another commenter. :) That said, you mentioned a beneficial trait becoming neutral, and that's making the assumption that greater intelligence is neutral. It could be that larger social organizations reward slightly less intelligent critters. That would do the trick rather quickly. I'm not making that claim, but am saying that discussions around evolution and traits that we have bias toward seeing as "good" are fraught. There's also the further issue of intelligence being a very nebulous term that encompasses tons of cognitive traits, which makes any discussion of intelligence in evolutionary terms even more difficult. It's also possible that some of what we call intelligence is epigenetic.
- Retric 12y ago
  I don't think we have good data on people’s intelligence 10,000 years ago. But, civilization as we think of it only impacted a fairly small chunk of humanity for a relatively small time period. So, at best 'larger social organizations' was rather localized. Just 500 years ago lots of people in North America where living nomadic hunter gather lifestyles. Even just 100 years ago you could find tribes in many parts of the world still living hunter gather lifestyles little changed over the last 15,000+ years and probably similar to how people lived 100,000+ thousand years ago. As to epigenetic factors, the classic hunter gather lifestyle could be very healthy as long as population numbers stayed low. Farming actually lowered many heath indicators even as it allowed for massive increases in population sizes. PS: Anyway, evolution is only 'fast' when there are significant benefits or harms. If a single mutation or environment change increases survival chances by say +/- 1% it takes exponentially longer to spread than a +/- 10% change.
  - lutusp 12y ago
    I gave up on cataloging the many grammatical and spelling errors in this post, but this one stood out for its unintended wit: "Farming actually lowered many heath indicators ..." Indeed, it's uncontroversial that farming degrades the heath.
    - Retric 12y ago
      lol
  - weeksie 12y ago
    I don't disagree with any of those points. My original post just stated that I couldn't imagine any fitness pressure that would be making humans smarter and, if anything, we were probably going in the other direction. My secondary point was that change can happen on short timelines. I do want to mention that larger social organizations were quite widespread in the Americas, despite the existence of hunter-gatherer tribes. The new world certainly wasn't an uncivilized wasteland when Europeans arrived. Epigenetic factors can be triggered buy group size (domestication) as well. So those hunter-gatherer tribes might share the same genetic traits but express them differently based on their environment.
    - Retric 12y ago
      any fitness pressure that would be making humans smarter I don’t recall the study, it was either men in the US or Britton. But, income was positively correlated with number of children. Income and intelligence are also linked so that's evidence that right now intelligence is positively correlated with number of children. This may be strongly linked with prison time but again that links with intelligence. The important thing to note is men often have children with more than one person and can have children vary late in life.