/sci/ - Science & Math

[Anonymous No.10706106]

What evolutionary role has near-sightedness aka myopia?

[Anonymous No.10706118]

signifying who is retarded or not.

less use of eyes shrinks the optical lobes and therefore allows room for other regions to grow. So it is a necessity to being a big brain.

I made all that shit up neural science isn't a science

[Anonymous No.10706121]

>>10706106
None. It's environmental. It seems to be caused by chloride overload and curable by high sodium/low chloride diet.

[Anonymous No.10706127]

Google it, there are some articles and other resources on this. Intuition tells me the main genetic factor is that humans are no longer hunter-gatherers and myopia is not as detrimental to the individual, also the environmental factors probably include the increase in close work like crafting and working with tools (spending more time indoors and using technology/reading).

[Anonymous No.10706128]

>>10706121
>curable by high sodium/low chloride diet

I-is this true?!

[Anonymous No.10706130]

>>10706106
That has not yet been determined: it appears to be a novel, dysgenic effect in the human population. In less evolved races eyesight is better: http://abc.net.au/news/2015-04-08/prince-harry-may-struggle-to-keep-up-with-aboriginal-super-sight/6378066

[Anonymous No.10706141]

>>10706118
Yeah it was easy to tell that you made this shit up

[Anonymous No.10706143]

>>10706128
No.

[Anonymous No.10706151]

What evolutionary role has this board?

[Anonymous No.10706160]

>>10706106
It takes less work to have eyes that only see long distances away when used for that purpose regularly than it would to have eyes which continue working great in spite of non-use.
Much of biological infirmity works that way. Perfection costs more than conditional effectiveness, and when the conditions of a conditionally effective structure change then the processes they cover start failing.

[Anonymous No.10706215]

what evolutionary role has deafness?

[Anonymous No.10706224]

>>10706160
myopia is associated with accelerated aging and screen exposure its not a conventional candidate for an evolutionary trade off

[Anonymous No.10706233]

>>10706215
myopia is not blindness, tho

[Anonymous No.10706234]

could it be that hunter gathers may have been blind as shit and we just romanticize them all to be athletes with perfect vision?

[Anonymous No.10706254]

You can still function with myopia, more so if it increases gradually and you don't wear glasses
The grandfather of a friend I had in high school was near sighted with -5 in both eyes and he was a truck driver, he didn't wear glasses when driving and I never could figure that out

[Anonymous No.10706314]

>>10706106
During development some people carry genes that cause the eyes to warp, this doesn't necessarily mean that they will have near-nearsightedness, but activities such as reading can cause it with low-light exposure. The same gene can cause far-nearsightedness in people who look at far away things with high-light exposure during development. Myopia is so common as people do nearly everything now inside at short distances.

[Anonymous No.10706429]

technology allows for dysgenic mutations to not be selected against and/or die off like they normally would. common genetic malfunctions that would otherwise end your genetic line in most cases are no longer a relevant impedance to reproduction

[Anonymous No.10706461]

>>10706224
>myopia is associated with accelerated aging and screen exposure its not a conventional candidate for an evolutionary trade off
Calling it "evolutionary trade off" or not doesn't really change anything. The point is just that perfection costs more than conditional effectiveness. Eyes clearly aren't perfect.

[Anonymous No.10706484]

>>10706106
>What evolutionary role has near-sightedness aka myopia?
>posts image of fake fashion glasses

[Anonymous No.10706492]

>>10706130
>less evolved races

[Anonymous No.10706512]

>>10706106
not every single fucking heritable trait has an evolutionary beneficial role and I wish this dumb meme would die already.

Pretty soon there's gonna be a thread asking what evolutionary purpose fucking ulcerative colitis serves

[Anonymous No.10706528]

>>10706512
Answer me this then, atheist, what's the evolutionary purpose of hemorrhoids?

[Anonymous No.10706642]

>>10706512
>Pretty soon there's gonna be a thread asking what evolutionary purpose fucking ulcerative colitis serves
>>10706528
>Answer me this then, atheist, what's the evolutionary purpose of hemorrhoids?
Systems with problems are insanely more cost effective than perfect systems. People with hemorrhoids and ulcerative colitis do not see a reduced lifespan and they still reproduce. All making perfect bodies that don't get hemorrhoids or ulcerative colitis would accomplish is making people suffer less, and suffering less in that way isn't what's driving natural selection.
tl;dr you should never expect perfection; it's way more expensive and would be for "benefits" that don't even impact natural selection much or at all

[Anonymous No.10706648]

>>10706130
But wouldn't that make them more evolved?

[Anonymous No.10706654]

It's for looking cool while reading

[Anonymous No.10706667]

>>10706648
Doesn't really make sense to call anything "more evolved" in the way people use that phrase. Evolution isn't a worse to better staircase. It's not like dolphins are just shitty birds that can't fly or something.

[Anonymous No.10706684]

>>10706461
Lack of use of a trait would have to be so significant that there would be a huge fitness cost to organisms that maintained a high level of reserve allocation for that function. The thing is that this doesn’t necessarily happen if firstly there is relaxed selection on low fitness physiological functions like great eyesight inside the big city illuminated day and night (presumably relieving people of the need to see anything in front of them like their computer screen or cars in an intersection) and secondly if there is no such immense energy cost as to require immediate shifting or resources to a different trait for survival and reproduction. What is more likely is that the environment itself literally degrades the organs more quickly, by way of poor diet, and straining of the eyes over time and that people age rapidly now while also breeding under relaxed conditions that drive increasing genetic load that sensitive traits like eyesight and visual processing would be vulnerable to.

[Anonymous No.10706697]

>>10706684
>What is more likely is that the environment itself literally degrades the organs more quickly
That's what I'm saying though. It's easier to have eyes that hold up in conditions they were originally in but not in these newer conditions then it would be to have perfect eyes which hold up unconditionally.

[Anonymous No.10706821]

>>10706697
If that’s what you’re saying then I agree but the OP framed it in terms of evolutionary benefit which is not a good way of thinking about the prevalence of myopia. There is no obvious benefit, limited evidence of connection with high intelligence but there are still other things more likely driving it which aren’t rendered irrelevant when that is considered either. A population’s fitness can just go down over time and this can correlate with vital functions becoming less efficient or degrading rapidly without any means of regaining lost efficiency or fitness through adaptation.

[Anonymous No.10707164]

the environment we live in no longer selects for good vision

[Anonymous No.10707683]

>>10706106
>What is the evolutionary role of not having a 3rd arm and being able to fly?
Nigger that's not how evolution works. Shit evolves out of a solution to a need. Reading by candle light and spending 12hrs in front of a computer are pretty recent needs only few of us have. Will eyes one day get better? Probably not considering we already fixed the need with glasses and surgery in this "everyone wins" elbow pads society and will pass these genes down forever.

[Anonymous No.10707701]

>>10706642
>people with ulcerative colitis do not see a reduced lifespan

[Anonymous No.10707706]

>>10707164
vision problems are caused by not going outside enough while growing up. this is why it's only specific to humans

[Anonymous No.10707721]

>>10706106
Intergenerational societal cohesion. Young people do the things you need long range vision for and old people do teaching and skilled work.
If we could always see as far as we wanted the old people wouldn't have any need for the younger ones.

[Anonymous No.10707735]

>>10707164
please stop posting shit about evolution if you do not understand that most traits are under neutral selection, the rest under negative selection and only a very few subject to positive selection

[Anonymous No.10707740]

>>10706118
>I made all that shit up neural science isn't a science
I don't give a fuck; I choose to believe it.

[Anonymous No.10707862]

>>10706667

[Anonymous No.10707916]

>>10707721
I'm near-sighted since I was 10 yo. Now what?

[Anonymous No.10707921]

>>10707862
Why didn’t you provide him any argument whatsoever?

[Anonymous No.10708020]

>>10707921
Apparently his argument is you're an effeminate weirdo unless you intentionally misrepresent how evolution works for political purposes.
>>10707862
Anon you faggot, nobody is claiming people can't be better or worse than one another. The point is *evolution* isn't a merit system with bad organisms turning into good organisms. Significant changes over time are adaptations to whatever circumstances a given variety of organism is in.
Just look at dolphins vs. hawks. Dolphins aren't shit hawks that can't fly and hawks aren't shit dolphins that can't swim. They're each just heavily adapted to their respective environment and niche.
You're still allowed to look down on abos and black people without needing to misunderstand evolutionary biology. Don't use that as an excuse to be a retard.

[Anonymous No.10708090]

>>10706121
>and curable by high sodium/low chloride diet
Doctors hate him

[Anonymous No.10708385]

>>10706106
Not every trait has an adaptative role or has been pushed by natural selection. Myopia is not a fatal trait, just as baldness or manletism.

[Anonymous No.10708434]

>>10706106
What evolutionary role has posting over and over again on /sci/ asking what evolutionary role random things have?

Many, many traits have no "evolutionary role," they are instead a consequence of the fact that variation among individuals in a population are a necessary precondition of evolution. The variations can be harmful or helpful or neutral, but they exist and as conditions change, previously harmful or neutral changes may suddenly become critically important for survival.

But unless and until that happens, they have no evolutionary role, they're just variations around the norm.

[Anonymous No.10708437]

>>10706130
>less evolved races

I laugh in your general direction.

[Anonymous No.10709276]

>>10706106
Its not evolutionary. Just like some people are born with longer toes, some people have shorter/longer eyes.
Its just more noticeable since it fucks with your eyesight, but physically, biologically, its a very millimetrical variation.

[Anonymous No.10709281]

>>10706106
What is the evolutionary purpose of not having an evolutionary purpose?

[Anonymous No.10709283]

>>10706106
these types of questions are actually retarded

[Anonymous No.10709304]

>>10706106
in the early human/caveman period, short sighted chads stayed with the women and fugged them all day, passing on their genes, while the healthy vision virgins were outside hunting for food

[Anonymous No.10710653]

>>10709276
Having a good eyesight is very important for the survival.
Having longer toes is irrelevant.

[Anonymous No.10710654]

>>10706234

This. Animals were bigger back then too, you don't need super vision to spot a giant brown fucking mammoth on an ice sheet

[Anonymous No.10710663]

>>10706128
Yes, it seems to be, though I am not sure why it is so. Try it. Aslo avoid phosphoric acid, since it causes sodium loss. You will lose taste for salty food as well, get ready for that.
>>10708090
It's obvious it must be environmental and it basically didn't exist several decades to roughly a hundred year ago. The industry woudl collapse if people found it's curable with baking soda.

[Anonymous No.10710719]

>>10706234
No. We know for sure that even modern hunter gatherers are athletes with perfect vision. Some aboriginals have actually better eyesight than what was thought physically possible.

[Anonymous No.10710751]

>>10710663
i want to believe but i need some data to prove that

[Anonymous No.10710753]

Is laser surgery a good option for eliminating nearsightedness? Can it make my vision be 20/20 ? Is it safe? Can you still apply to be astronaut or pilot after it?

[Anonymous No.10710764]

>>10710653
Mutations appear on every generation and have nothing to do with your parents' genes.
Normally you have slightly (1 nm) thicker fingernails, or a very slightly more viscous mucus lining in your colon. These are irrelevant and no one notices.
If your eye is 0.5mm longer or shorter, you have trash eyesight. Biologically, half a milimeter means nothing, it has as much weight as a couple extra muscle fibers in your neck.
In the stone age people with poor eyesight would have died, but that doesnt mean the mutation will stop appearing in the next generation. Most serious diseases meant instant death until the 20th century and we still have them today, genetics doesnt work the way you think it does.

[Anonymous No.10710770]

>>10710764
That is not how it works. Eyes are malleable and finely tune according to the visual input. There are at least two mechanisms (on in the retina and one inthe cornea) that shape the eyesight and both (or all, if there ar more) need to fail for you to become nearsighted.

[Anonymous No.10710776]

>>10710770
If the light focuses in front of the retina you're short sighted. Whether this is because your lens is wrong, your eye length is wrong, or your eye fluid makes it refract wrong is pretty irrelevant, you only need one to fail. I dont know where you got that you need all factors to fail, eyes are pretty fucking fragile and nowhere near as malleable as you'd think. Eye shape doesnt change at all, for the most part, lens and iris do all the work.

[Anonymous No.10710784]

>>10710776
This si untrue. The retina can move closer or further away, (very slowly, in the matter of days) and the cornea can apparently tune to stronger or weaker refraction somehow. The lens function is to provide immediate focus. Naturally, the eye targets a little bit of farsightedness. (about 1D)

It's only when these mechanisms fail when you become nearsighted. The mechanism is also quite fast, as was shown by experiments with people wearing glasses (the equivalent of a lasik each week or two, IIRC) it's that in nearsighted people the target is off the correct point for an unknown reason.

[Anonymous No.10710788]

>>10710753
no

[Anonymous No.10710790]

>>10710753
You can be an astronaut with glasses, there's plenty. No one really gives much of a fuck about this.
Focus on your academic achievements if you really want to go to spess, astronauts are scientists, not superathletes, thats a cold war meme.

[Anonymous No.10710797]

>>10710784
One diopter is nothing, most people with 1.5 or less go their whole lives without glasses because they simply dont need them unless they have to read for hours.
Im talking about serious eye problems that your eye cant correct by flexing. If your image focuses wrong, you're near/farsighted, just because your eye can temporarily correct it doesnt mean it should. Thats like saying your right leg isnt broken because you can skip on your left. A crutch is not correction.

I have 10+ diopters of hypermetropy in both eyes and while yes, I can strain my eyes to see "better" for a while, I'll never read or do anything without contacts. Neither straining my eyes or glases give me 20/20 vision, Im still farsighted.

[Anonymous No.10710802]

>>10710797
farsightedness isn't nearly as bad - as I said the eye actually targets a bit of farsightedness, if it's compeltely healthy. I'm nearsighted and even the slightest nearsightedness is noticeable, especially in the dark.

That is not what I mean though. Re-read my post please, it's only when these mechanisms fail when you become far/nearsighted in the first place, not that they somewhat allow you to leve with it.

[Anonymous No.10710809]

>>10710797
farsightedness isn't nearly as bad - as I said the eye actually targets a bit of farsightedness, if it's compeltely healthy. Even the slightest nearsightedness is noticeable, especially in the dark.

That is not what I mean though. Re-read my post please, it's only when these mechanisms fail when you become far/nearsighted in the first place, not that they somewhat allow you to leve with it.

I used to have 7+D on both eyes, now I have little over 5, apparently, with no astigmatism on both after roughly two months of low chloride.

[Anonymous No.10711023]

>>10710764
>Biologically, half a milimeter means nothing, it has as much weight as a couple extra muscle fibers in your neck.
I could probably do with some extra muscle fibers in my arms
I can't build muscle

[Anonymous No.10711126]

>>10710764
>Biologically, half a milimeter means nothing

It literally causes death.

[Anonymous No.10711258]

>>10711126
You really think you couldnt be a farmhand with a couple of diopters.

[Anonymous No.10711508]

>>10711258
Actually, you couldn't. Even a few diopters can be a real problem if you work with plants.

[Anonymous No.10711515]

>>10706121
Man, this guy really hates salt.

[Anonymous No.10711556]

>>10706121
So eat lots of sodium acetate?

you sound like one of those electric alkaline faggoteers

[Anonymous No.10711620]

>>10711556
It isn't about alkalinity, it's about the sodium. Phosphoric acid causes sodium loss, table salt cannot replenish it, since chloride also causes sodium loss nearly equivalent to the amount found in salt. Which is why you need a source that doesn't contain either of those. (I use sodium citrate and MSG instead of salt)

[Anonymous No.10711649]

>role
>role
>role

that isn't how evolution works

[Anonymous No.10711656]

>>10706106
it frees up processing power much like being far sighted. a nice chunk of your brain is devoted to simply processing what you see

and the disturbing thing is how much your brain guestimates pixels. so much of your brain working overtime on that shit and the average person doesnt even actually see the world in a single mega pixel

so having slightly bad vision is actually a merit because your not wasting as much energy on such things AND the brain can rewire itself so nothing truly goes to waste

granted being able to see things close up is preferred since not being able to see fine detail at range isnt that big of a deal . however either will give you a bump in total processing power you can leverage on things

[Anonymous No.10711954]

>>10711656
You need your eyesight for survival.
Wasting energy or not wasting, if a species can't use a sensory organ that's an essential part of survival, that organism sucks.

[Anonymous No.10714144]

>>10706128
No

[Anonymous No.10714199]

>>10706160
Lmao it doesn't take that much more effort to see long distances. Sometimes myopia is caused by misshapen eyeballs, not weakness of the muscles. Hence sometimes it's more of a defect than doing less work. Furthermore the modern diet just makes any such argument a little absurd.

[Anonymous No.10714562]

>>10706106
it makes the Jews lots of money

[Anonymous No.10715206]

>>10706106
literally lack of sunlight or whatever.
u need the sun vitamin to develop ur eyes when your young.
kids dont go outside

[Anonymous No.10715238]

>>10706106
tripping and falling onto my dick, hopefully

[Anonymous No.10715454]

Myopia happens when your eye lens become slightly out of alignment due to lack of sunlight. Sunlight is what calibrates our eyes. It's why myopia is directly correlated with how many hours children spend inside.

[Anonymous No.10715459]

>>10706118
Based

[Anonymous No.10715463]

It didn’t benefit anyone, but it increased survival. In a tribe, if you had poor vision you’d stay at home during raids and hunts which is where most men died. Staying safer meant you still got wives and shit but reproduced more often so the genes perpetuated until agriculture became common enough that vision beyond 18/20 was pointless

[Anonymous No.10715486]

>>10706106
haven't done a full literature search, but one time I got curious about this and it seems like a lot of researchers think it has to do with outdoor light exposure from a young age

[Anonymous No.10715516]

>>10715454
>>10715486
Didn't studies on asian schoolchildren reject the sunlight hypothesis?

[Anonymous No.10715631]

>>10706106
Consider the following;
Macro evolution is not real

[Anonymous No.10715644]

>>10706106
None. People didn't really live passed 30 and your eyes start to go around 40.
Lots of shitty genes have been passed on because of modern technology and medicine

[Anonymous No.10715651]

>>10715644
People get glasses at age 8

[Anonymous No.10715657]

>>10715651
>Lots of shitty genes have been passed on because of modern technology and medicine

[Anonymous No.10715658]

>>10706127
Smart posts are always ignored

[Anonymous No.10715666]

>>10715644
Modern medicine is far too recent to have such effects and many deleterious gene versions have like 20-40% carrier rate. You find them in ancient DNA too.

[Anonymous No.10715702]

>>10706106
Lack of sunlight exposure = eye cannot adjust/focus on far/near objects properly = myopia.

[Anonymous No.10715712]

>>10706648
No, less. They haven't evolved shitty eyesight.

[Anonymous No.10715715]

>>10707735
>people with shitty eyesight don't get killed off anymore
what's not to get dipshit

[Anonymous No.10715723]

>>10710764
>In the stone age people with poor eyesight would have died, but that doesnt mean the mutation will stop appearing in the next generation.
No, but they would keep dying and so the mutations that already exist would have a harder time spreading because they'd get pruned each generation. Now they don't.

[Anonymous No.10715850]

>>10715666
You can have defected eyes now and live just fine, passing on your shitty genes.
Try that 5 thousand years ago when survival depended on combat, and hunting meat.
Our societies we have formed have allowed all kinds of defects to flourish.

[Anonymous No.10715852]

>>10706106
None. It's just an unfortunate product of our biology and the environment. It wouldn't occur in a healthy society in any case.

[Anonymous No.10715886]

>>10715850
Bullshit. All common variants linked to disease have been around in pre-industrial times at the same frequency. You have no idea how long it takes for a variant to increase just by a percent right now.

[Anonymous No.10715919]

>>10715886
Nonsense. The rates have increased dramatically in recent decades. https://www.nature.com/news/the-myopia-boom-1.17120

[Anonymous No.10715925]

>>10715919
You can't seriously believe that myopia-causing mutations increased from 10-20 to 90% in sixty years. Such increases happen by lifestyle factors, like the article you didn't read, explains.

[Anonymous No.10715968]

>>10706127
>also the environmental factors probably include the increase in close work like crafting and working with tools (spending more time indoors and using technology/reading).
This, watchmakers were probably all nearsighted. I can put my nose right up to an object and still see detail crystal clear. Human beings are successful because we can specialize on a specific task and let others do the tasks were not good at. Being social animals that work together is the most important part of our survival.

[Anonymous No.10716251]

>>10715925
I'm saying from the beginning it's environmental and not genetic.

[Anonymous No.10716443]

>>10710663
What has high sodium low chloride? Isnt nearly all the sodium we eat in the form of NaCl?

[Anonymous No.10716576]

>>10716443
MSG, sodium citrate, baking soda.

[Anonymous No.10716597]

>>10706106
> What evolutionary role
Evolution is a dart thrown at a dart board. What evolutionary role does the dart play if you miss?

[Anonymous No.10717297]

PLEASE BE AWARE THAT THIS POST IS NOT A RESPONSE OF A BUMP AND/OR SPONSORSHIP OF THIS THREAD, BUT A TACTICAL POINT FOR THE DISSEMINATION OF A NEW MEME DESIGNED TO EXPERTLY SHORT CIRCUIT FAILURES TO UNDERSTAND EVOLUTIONARY REASONING.


If evolution had a purpose, there would only be one organism.

[Anonymous No.10717346]

>>10717297
why would evolution have a purpose, it's just spreading the genes of the most successful breeders.

[Anonymous No.10718386]

>>10716597
A dart is not a living thing, though.

[Anonymous No.10718471]

>>10707683
It's only going to get worse, who cares I guess, once we are all moles from childhood nobody will regret the days where you could see fine unaided.
Also
>muh CRISPR/agumentations

[Anonymous No.10718586]

>>10706127
>also the environmental factors probably include the increase in close work like crafting and working with tools (spending more time indoors and using technology/reading).

You can't work with anything (not even creating simple tools) with 2-3 diopters or above.