• Despite high standard of living, advances in medicine, we continue to evolve at the same pace as mos
    37 replies, posted
[QUOTE=MightyMax;35784667]I haven't seen any mutations in people that could be classed as a beneficial one in... ever. They've all been horrible, disfiguring ones. And all 'normal' people get to mate, and reproduce, so there is no selection anymore. Everyone's genes get passed. [editline]1st May 2012[/editline] obviously gonna get dumbs for this, for whatever reason[/QUOTE] athletes, people with 140IQ or higher, unusually attractive individuals basically if you look at the distribution of people in any human activity, the people to the far right of the bell curve will have almost certainly have genetic factors influencing their success (not to say environment doesn't count for anything)
[QUOTE=MightyMax;35784667]I haven't seen any mutations in people that could be classed as a beneficial one in... ever. They've all been horrible, disfiguring ones. And all 'normal' people get to mate, and reproduce, so there is no selection anymore. Everyone's genes get passed. [/QUOTE] Every human has some sort of mutation. Just most aren't obvious and do not get in ways of everyday living. In other words, they're quite insignificant. The disfigured people are less mutation and more errors during development in womb that made them messed up.
[QUOTE=AceOfDivine;35784714]Every human has some sort of mutation. Just most aren't obvious and do not get in ways of everyday living. In other words, they're quite insignificant. The disfigured people are less mutation and more errors during development in womb that made them messed up.[/QUOTE] Oh. thanks for clearing that up for me.
It seems to me that the main cause of confusion here is that evolution does not cause the passing on of the genes of those who live the longest, or are the healthiest, or are the strongest, or have the most sex; it simply passes on the genes of the people who have the most children, and of course those children have to be healthy enough to have children themselves if the mutation is to be passed on for any length of time. (Sidenote, holy shit, that was the longest grammatically correct sentence I've ever written by far.) Anyway, of course we're still evolving, the speed of evolution won't change unless the rate of mutations changes. It just isn't survival of the fittest anymore, because living long enough to breed is no longer a day-to-day struggle in many parts of the world.
[QUOTE=DainBramageStudios;35784441]it's reasonable. if you remove selection pressures, then you would expect neutral and disadvantageous mutations to accumulate in the population.[/QUOTE] No it's not. What you described does not change the speed or constancy of evolutionary forces, it merely alters their output. You seem to be thinking that evolution has a direction. It's moving at the same speed in an altered course. Objectively beneficial changes are not a requisite of evolution, they are an output of natural selection. [editline]1st May 2012[/editline] An analogy: You tie and light two fuses. One fuse is attached to dynamite. The other fuse is attached to a rock. One explodes, the other does not. You would not say that the fuse attached to the rock had not burned, you would say the rock had not exploded.
[QUOTE=Lankist;35789191] An analogy: You tie and light two fuses. One fuse is attached to dynamite. The other fuse is attached to a rock. One explodes, the other does not. You would not say that the fuse attached to the rock had not burned, you would say the rock had not exploded.[/QUOTE] Assuming you define evolution by the fuse burning. They don't explain their measurement in the article, but it could very well be the difference in genoms from their parents, which in your analogy would be the equivalent of measuring how strongly the rock exploded vs. the dynamite.
[QUOTE=GreenLeaf;35781774]i wonder if we'll evolve eyes that can peer into the computer screen for a greater amount of time without drying up. And buttocks which will not feel like they're burning after 6 hours of sitting down. [editline]1st May 2012[/editline] hell! throw in an extra arm too to allow for faster typing and gaming! [editline]1st May 2012[/editline] i'm joking. i'm fully aware of how evolution works.[/QUOTE] At last, the N64 controller will have some functionality!
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