Wintran wrote:andyville wrote:The more I came to understand the topic, however, I became convinced that the traditional mechanisms underlying evolution - natural selection, survival of the fittest and so on - are becoming outdated. It is my conviction that we are standing on the verge of a new phase of evolution; with the developing techniques of biological engineering, neuroscience, nanotechnology and so on, we will soon be able to either design ourselves, or create new beings with certain qualities.
This is a very interesting topic which I've also given some thought.
As our traditional evolution works, the most fit individuals for the current environment are those who survive and mate. Generally, among both animals and humans, physical attributes have been valued highly, as this generally means stronger survival skills and withstanding of sickness. However, intelligence has also proven to be of very high value as a survival skill, which humans are a proof of.
Today, humans in general have no serious everyday threat that would require extreme intelligence or physical fitness to survive, which means that most of us are able to live and spread our genes regardless of if we're more "fit" than others or not. This means that our evolution has practically stopped, as there's no fair way of controlling sexuality so that only the most fit people would be allowed to have children. Especially as "fit" is such a relative term.
This is not correct. How can you say evolution has stopped? Our environment is not the same as it was when we were cavemen but we still have pressures on us to adapt all the time. And how can you determine who is more "fit"? Smarter women reproduce later in life and have fewer children. Women, according to scientists, who have children earlier in their lives than the average are more genetically 'fit'. It doesn't look like intelligence is a good adaptation for propagation of the species, does it?
And intelligence comes in many forms, you can't categorize the myriad ways in which intelligence can be shown, it is like trying to put all the functions of the brain into neat slots, it doesn't work that way. There is physical intelligence, muscles are controlled by the brain as well, they don't just work in isolation. There is social intelligence: a person with a low cognitive IQ can function well in society and sometimes much better than a high IQ type person if they have good interpersonal skills. There is intuitive intelligence. There is visuospatial intelligence, musical intelligence ...
And we don't know exactly which is the best combination of these intelligences that will help the individual to be the better survivor in our current environment. We won't know until many centuries have passed and we won't be around to find that out at any rate.
Adaptation and evolution is too complex to pigeonhole as you are doing. You are over-simplifying things and coming out with statements like human evolution has stopped. Evolution never stops. Because the environment never stays static. Have you heard people say, "You can always count on change to happen."?
I don't even know if the smartest people on earth are the best-equipped to continue the human race, or the strongest (biggest, fastest, most muscular), or even the healthiest (strongest immune systems) - it is too complicated to generalize like that. There is too much variation among individuals and society is too complex to make judgments like that.
What we have now is technology and science, which currently seems like the only path that can help us survive in the long run,
No, it is the opposite. Technology will be our downfall. We are not gods, we cannot control nature, we cannot reverse entropy. All the technological advances we have made have sped up the process of entropy. We cannot live when entropy has reached a certain stage. Even nuclear power has an endgame at some point. We can create all the wastes we want while the going is good and the resources are available, but one day we will run out of places to store the built up radioactive materials and materials to house them so that they don't kill humans, that is, if we haven't all died from nuclear radiation from leaks and accidents before that.
If man had lived like caveman as old up until now, man's future would be brighter. We still would not live forever, we would eventually go extinct, but the day that happens would happen later than sooner compared to the situation man finds itself now. Look at America. Since the arrival of white man, the land has been despoiled irreparably. There has been more environmental destruction in the space of 200 years than has happened in the 10,000 years prior to that. At this rate, America can't last much longer - it will become an apocalyptic situation with massive cancer rates, obesity rates, poisoned water, droughts. floods, desertification, deforestation, demineralization of the earth. The wars being fought in America's name at the moment are all about resources, about dwindling resources. I can foresee more wars in the future as the country with the highest consumption rate in the world needs the raw materials and energy to keep up its consumption rate. The consumption rate hasn't been getting lower or even kept steady, it is increasing. Even if Americans used only the resources found in their country - and the US is abundant in resources relative to many other countries around the world - one day it will have found it is running out and then it will be on the push to acquire resources from elsewhere - and you get war.
Don't forget we aren't robots, we are organic machines and we need the biosphere to support our life.
or even evolve us further (we already have medicin and vaccine that help protect our bodies, and computers that help us think).
The medicine and the vaccine only serve to weaken the species as a whole, physically speaking. If there had been no medicine and vaccines, mother nature would have weeded out the sicker and weaker more quickly and we would have a much healthier (naturally) population than we do now. If anything technological advances in this area has made us evolve into a physically less fit population, maybe more intelligent (cognition-wise) population though. But it has also made our societies more complex. People think of health care as a right these days, and society has to spend a large proportion of its budget on health care for its population. Then you have the rise of Big Pharm and the creation of a drug-dependent society. Only a few centuries ago, there were no such thing as a hospital. You got sick, you died, just like when the Bubonic Plague hit Europe.
This is the same principle that is seen in operation in the horse-breeding world. Because of the availability of vet medicines, the thoroughbreds have been selected for just speed and these horses are the least hardy of the species. One slight illness could kill them if they didn't have meds and vet care to prevent that. Their offspring then become animals that are dependent on vet meds to survive. We humans are becoming much the same.
Especially looking at our current situation of overpopulation I'd say we definitely need a way to spread to other planets. I also think our general knowledge and awareness need to be increased as much as possible, to avoid extinction of nature, war and conflicts that could cause our own destruction.
What makes you think that if we can't make it here, on earth, in an environment where we have evolved to fit in with, with its abundance of water, food, trees, nature, a favorable climate (relatively speaking) and atmopshere that supports respiration - all the things we need to survive, that we can make it on a planet where none of these things are in existence?
Do you know how much materials and resources and energy and technology went into putting some people on the moon for a few hours or minutes? You are like many people I have come across that naively believe that living on another planet is the solution to the survival of the human race as this planet becomes increasingly unsupportable for life.
We might as well stay here and live here because living on earth takes up fewer resources than living on another planet. These would-be space dwellers or people who think a human civilization on another planet is feasible need to face the truth that as biological beings humans aren't suited to living anywhere else except planet earth. We have one stab at it and that's it.
Western civilization is spectacular in human achievement but when it comes to evolution and the survival of the human race, it is a major step backward and spells the early doom of humans (now measured in tens of millennia as opposed to millions of years before western technology rapidly spread over the globe). Western philosophy is tied in with this - it is a NOW philosophy, it doesn't think ahead in terms of thousands of years, but more of - can we make money from it now? This short-term thinking and planning will utlimately bring a swift end to the planet because it is like a civilization that poops in the water that people drink because it's cheaper now than doing it elsewhere, and besides it's other people's drinking water, not the people's who are doing the pooping. Although we are all ultimately connected in this bioweb. The strong faith in technology and the belief that technology will save the world are all part of this western outlook on life.