/sci/ - Science & Math

>>4272313
Evolution has mainly stopped on a physical level because we're at a point where technology does things for us rather than our physical bodies needing change.

It doesn't matter that we can't fight a tiger, because we can shoot it, therefor our 'weak' don't die.

However one could argue that evolution will happen on a intellectual level now but I don't think that really matters since people will always choose to be retarded anyway

>Has evolution pretty much stopped for humans?

Nope. It has accelerated.

As our dependency on technology increases in greatness, the traits favoring physical capability will become useless. They will be weeded out.

He should stick to his own field of expertise (getting himself on television).

Single Nucleotide Polymorphism analysis has shown that rather than human evolution slowing down, it is speeding up.

http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2007/12/10-01.html

That feel when you can't genetically evolve catgirls to suit your interest in one generation.

;____;

>>4272331
Quickly glancing its talking about genes that edit things like illness.

In the video he is talking about physical traits. There is no reason in modern society for our physical traits to change

>>4272338
Read it again. They do not say what the newly evolved alleles are "for." Genetics has not advanced to that point. Most frequently SNPs cause disease and are weeded out, but sometimes they confer a new and advantageous trait and propagate through the population. So you track the rate of evolution by tracking SNPs.

Macroscopic physical traits will not change significantly due to the interference of medicine. To use an extreme example, a child would never be born with wings because doctors would do all they could to remove/correct the abnormality.

There's also the matter of time scales.

I think the citations in this thread going against the notion of ceased human evolution are essentially disingenuous in what evolution is actually accelerating. My guess would be that the 'mechanisms' of evolution are speeding up, but no actual evolution is occurring.

Personally, I'm in the punctuated equilibrium camp, when it comes to evolution, and I see virtually no selection pressures currently present on any human population.

i personally we are biologically devolving as we have effectively eliminated the idea of 'survival of the fittest'. We let the weak live on and breed

Michio Kaku is so stupid.

Of course evolution is still going on.

Listen lots of things have changed about our physical environment.

For one, people walk a lot less and exercise less.

Bam, natural selection.

Human beings, who were used to eating a diet of meat and vegetables now eat mostly grains and carbohydrates.

Physical evolution.

Pollution, crappy food, sugar, heat attacks, strokes, cancer.

Evolution.

None of this includes any sexual evolution kind of things. Or pressures from employment or education.

Physicall we are all mating, and attractive people are attractive, and non attractive people may have attractive sons/daugthers. therefore physically we are diversifying but not evolving.

What about intellectually?

People who are stupid have stupid children because thats how they are raised, unless the parents or the government forces the children to learn. As long as the children live in a constructive environment where everyone has an equal chance to learn ( even though there will always be people who dont learn, this randomness of choosing to be intellectual may by corrolated with the same randomness of attractiveness) then there will be no intellectual evolution in terms of physical capabilities...

ok, so what about mutations? And is our society's pressure on the young to become intellectuals also causing an effect on genetics?

Y no inherited memory?

>>4272388
I never really liked you that much, but this comment just made your poll numbers drop like crazy.

Don't speak of which you do not know.

>>4272391

Alright you dont like me, but am I wrong? Do these selective pressures not exist?

>>4272394

You're begging the question. Evolution implies selective pressure; the reverse isn't necessarily true.

>>4272394
Yes you are wrong. They are only selective pressure is they affect rates of reproduction. One's ability to drive a car to work instead of walk a Savannah doesn't make him magically have more or less babies.

And our diet hasn't really changed for many reasons, not least of which is because we have all types of food available so we just eat what we want (what our ancestors wanted). And that doesn't affect human evolution.

>>4272396

What do you mean the reverse isnt necessarily true?

>>4272399

40,000 people die from car accidents a year. Another 40,000 from car pollution related illness. In a life time its plausible to die from this. Some people will naturally be better at driving, others wont and will die.

Likewise heart attack and cancer are leading causes of death. If you can conquer those you can raise your kids more efficiently.

Our diet has changed substainially. We do eat what we want, but our ancestors never had the option of eating things like bread or other high carbohydrate food. That selects away from certain people.

Depression is another example. Depression has a genetic basis, and is the leading cause of death in people in their 20s.

Drug use can make or break people and I suspect largely is a fairly new issue.

>They are only selective pressure is they affect rates of reproduction

Which changes the genetic make up of people. If brown haired people suddenly have kids in higher frequency than blonde haired people, regardless of the trait causing anyone to die off, the genes change over time and evolution occurs.

>>4272417
Cool statistics bro, except where the part where you obviously know nothing about biology and the fact that human beings are 99.9% similar since we all came from a group of humans less than a couple thousand in numbers, and for anything to affect macro evolution on the now 7 billion members of the human population they'd have to do a whole hell a lot more damage than ~100,000 people. Which is comparatively to a population of a few thousand is less than one person. Just because one person dies of an infected tooth doesn't magically imbue the rest of the tribe with infection-resistant teeth.

You're an economist, just shut up.

>>4272431

This is relative to the modern world, and its a yearly risk. So in one year your odds are .01% I guess thats not much but you are likely to be driving around for 60 years of your life. That gets compounded to almost a whole percentage. If one in a hundred people will die of something, I think thats relatively significant.

Its not a huge pressure, but its one of many strange new pressures.

>>4272451
Apparently you don't understand English.

>just shut up

>>4272454

No I refuse.

I just read a three-page article in a Scandinavian science magazine about how fast evolution can occur.

>>4272461
Ok, crash course in Evolution:

Oh no, vast majorities of our population are being eaten by a monster while trying to hunt. Wow, look at that guy he can run really fast and makes it back to the females without being eaten by the monster. He mates with all the bitches, and most of his babies are fast like him. They are able to escape from the monster, and the ones that don't die. Soon all of the members of that species are fast.

How evolution does NOT work:

Man, there are no monsters eating us and tim just died of a heart attack. Well fuck, let's all magically protect ourselves from heart attacks.

sage for your utter idiocy

>>4272469

Well now tim and his shitty heart cant have kids.

Maybe tim gets all fat and now none of the females want to have his kids. He might as well have been eaten by a monster.

Maybe he gets depressed kills him self... and doesnt have kids.

Everything I have listened so far has influence on people's reproductive capacity.

>>4272480

>>4272481

>>4272499
The worst part about this is you're going to go to bed thinking you're right, and even possibly giving others your false information.

That is everything wrong in the world.

>>4272527

Well correct me. I could be horribly wrong, but calling me an utter idiot, or complaining about my existence doesnt help.

>>4272538
I have corrected you. Numerous times. And each time you went even more retarded.

>>4272554

More like you just resort to attacking my person.

Things evolve when these is selection. There are a variety of forms of selection, many of which are not dictated by organisms dying before they can have children, such as sexual selection and artificial selection. Many many many new and foreign factors exist in our environment. These factors select people, regardless of how relevant you think that selection is.

Are we still breeding?
>yes
Are we still selecting traits
>yes

Evolution still applies. We shouldn't be so short sighted as to deny its happening to us because we can't observe it.

Think about it, we still have pressures to conform to, the human race is still moving in a direction. But that direction hasn't got to be us.

>>4272568
>>4272575

Clearly, /sci/ is too retarded to have this conversation.

is interbreeding between negroids and more evolved races such as caucasians or mongoloids reversing evolution?

I believe humans are[have] passing[passed] the evolutionary baton from the physical to the non-physical. However, I believe that most of our societies diminish this growth

>>4272581
What do you mean by Caucasians? Sand niggers, kikes, etc. are caucasians, they aren't any better than negros.

>>4272838

Sand niggers and kikes are light years ahead of negros