On Darwinism

[PastaJoe]

This thread has been up for several days and there is still no answer on the antlers item which was a critical piece of the whole argument. I think it would be neat to have antlers and if I can't have them I'm wondering if a kid of mine might. Is there a particular type of girl I should woo for instance?

 

Also, are there non-genetic antlers available via plastic surgery?

 

Just find a girl with a nice rack.

 

There are some guys in punk freak shows that have had artificial horns put under the skin on their skulls to create devil-like horns, so I suppose they could put larger ones in. But at some point the size and weight would be too much for your head to support.

[ieatcrayonz]

But at some point the size and weight would be too much for your head to support.

Are you saying I need to get more head?

[woolley]

genes are merely a blueprint that specifies what is possible given an optimal environment...not everyone has the same environment...over the last 150 years people in industrialized nations have grown over 4 inches in average.

 

Yes, but this has been attributed to nutrition and not Darwinian evolution.

 

In order for it to be "evolution", you'd have to have the environment "select" (sorry for the quotes...no I'm not) for taller people over shorter people, and basically with a technological society where the sick are cured there really are no extant selective pressures, it ain't just the "fit" that reproduce or have offspring that must survive to reproduce.

 

Woolley

[Nervous Guy]

Yes, but this has been attributed to nutrition and not Darwinian evolution.

 

In order for it to be "evolution", you'd have to have the environment "select" (sorry for the quotes...no I'm not) for taller people over shorter people, and basically with a technological society where the sick are cured there really are no extant selective pressures, it ain't just the "fit" that reproduce or have offspring that must survive to reproduce.

 

Woolley

natural selection is based on the interaction of genes with environment (nutrition)...

[woolley]

natural selection is based on the interaction of genes with environment (nutrition)...

 

Natural selection selects genes. Genes are not influenced by nutrition, phenotype does not affect genotype. Our zygotes aren't "improved" because we are eating better. -Woolley

[Nervous Guy]

Natural selection selects genes. Genes are not influenced by nutrition, phenotype does not affect genotype. Our zygotes aren't "improved" because we are eating better. -Woolley

 

http://www.newcenturyhealthpublishers.com/...ition/index.php

 

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.f...p;dopt=Abstract

 

http://www.ajcn.org/cgi/content/full/76/3/696

 

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2006/...60814121912.htm

[Orton's Arm]

 

http://www.newcenturyhealthpublishers.com/...ition/index.php

 

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.f...p;dopt=Abstract

 

http://www.ajcn.org/cgi/content/full/76/3/696

 

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2006/...60814121912.htm

Woolley was dead-on right. He was saying that whether you take good care of yourself or not, your underlying genetics will remain the same. The genes you're passing onto your kids will be the same. Natural selection works by giving those with the best genes more opportunities to survive or reproduce. And that's correct.

 

But, you might respond, what about a situation where animals have roughly the same genetics, but radically different environments? Clearly those who had the best environments will tend to have a strong advantage for survival and reproduction. But this type of natural selection does not improve the gene pool, and therefore does not result in Darwinistic evolution. Darwinism deals strictly with how genetically-based reproductive or survival advantages gradually change species' genetics.

 

The articles you found indicate that if person A and person B both eat the same meals; their bodies will likely respond in different ways due to their genetic differences. That's also correct; but not something that contradicts anything written by Woolley.

[Nervous Guy]

Woolley was dead-on right. He was saying that whether you take good care of yourself or not, your underlying genetics will remain the same. The genes you're passing onto your kids will be the same. Natural selection works by giving those with the best genes more opportunities to survive or reproduce. And that's correct.

 

But, you might respond, what about a situation where animals have roughly the same genetics, but radically different environments? Clearly those who had the best environments will tend to have a strong advantage for survival and reproduction. But this type of natural selection does not improve the gene pool, and therefore does not result in Darwinistic evolution. Darwinism deals strictly with how genetically-based reproductive or survival advantages gradually change species' genetics.

 

The articles you found indicate that if person A and person B both eat the same meals; their bodies will likely respond in different ways due to their genetic differences. That's also correct; but not something that contradicts anything written by Woolley.

I know what he was saying and he's wrong. Your genes are the potential and they can be influenced by nutrition. And as I said before natural selection acts on the phenotype. The phenotype is the overall result of an individual's genes, the environment, and the interactions between genes and between genes and the environment.

[Orton's Arm]

I was only kidding; you didn't actually have to indulge Holcomb's Arm's drivel. I mean, if he doesn't even know that evolutionary theory isn't about genetic variance (oooh, there's that pesky mystery word again, HA) but how the environment selects for beneficial traits, why even bother?

Speaking of Darwinism, I wondered what would happen if they dug up a number of missing links between humans and chimps. These missing links would need to be preserved in Siberian glaciers; with a few cells intact enough so that you could clone them. The most human-like of the missing links could be bred with humans; while the most chimp-like could be bred with chimps. Then you'd start breeding the resulting offspring with other missing links closer to the middle of the chain. Eventually, you'd wind up with a creature that was part human, part chimp, and part missing link.

 

Then I asked myself: why go through all that when you already have Bungee Jumper?

[Orton's Arm]

I know what he was saying and he's wrong. Your genes are the potential and they can be influenced by nutrition. And as I said before natural selection acts on the phenotype. The phenotype is the overall result of an individual's genes, the environment, and the interactions between genes and between genes and the environment.

You seem to be saying that natural selection "chooses" the fittest based on phenotype. Woolley seems to be saying natural selection increases fitness over the course of several generations by altering the genotype. Both sentiments are true.

[Nervous Guy]

You seem to be saying that natural selection "chooses" the fittest based on phenotype. Woolley seems to be saying natural selection increases fitness over the course of several generations by altering the genotype. Both sentiments are true.

Here's something else that is interesting...."The study suggests a way mutations could build up in a population, says Nipam Patel, an evo-devo researcher at the University of Chicago. If good nutrition can mask harmful genetic changes, mutations might accumulate unnoticed. Should diet then change, the mutations would exert their influence, possibly changing the animals' physical or behavioral traits. Then evolution could take its course, selecting against some of these traits while favoring others."

 

http://sciencenow.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/2002/507/4

[Orton's Arm]

Here's something else that is interesting...."The study suggests a way mutations could build up in a population, says Nipam Patel, an evo-devo researcher at the University of Chicago. If good nutrition can mask harmful genetic changes, mutations might accumulate unnoticed. Should diet then change, the mutations would exert their influence, possibly changing the animals' physical or behavioral traits. Then evolution could take its course, selecting against some of these traits while favoring others."

 

http://sciencenow.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/2002/507/4

A good blurb. I couldn't read the article because the site required a login. But I'll grant the premise of the blurb. Darwinism can only work when those who are the least fit tend to survive less often, or reproduce less often, than those who are most fit. If a certain trait no longer increases one's chances of reproducing or surviving, that trait becomes vestigial.

 

How does this apply to humans? In modern Western nations, the percentage of people who die before they reach sexual maturity is very small. The main factor in deciding which genes get passed onto the next generation, and which genes don't, is the number of children people decide to have. Less intelligent people are choosing to have more children than smart people. The Darwinistic forces that are supposed to be improving the gene pool are, in this case, actually exerting downward pressure on whichever alleles are associated with intelligence. If other planets' intelligent species experienced a similar situation, it would help explain the Fermi Paradox.

[woolley]

I know what he was saying and he's wrong. Your genes are the potential and they can be influenced by nutrition. And as I said before natural selection acts on the phenotype. The phenotype is the overall result of an individual's genes, the environment, and the interactions between genes and between genes and the environment.

 

OK, I thought you were talking Lamarckian, I get your point. Here's my point, which I didn't really develop.

 

If humans, say in our culture, lived in a state where people who ate the best reproduced 5 times more than people who didn't eat well at all, you'd be able to say that nutrition does guide which genes get propagated. But everybody reproduces. Just because you are rich and eat well and are, errr, really big or whatever, doesn't mean you're any more or less likely to reproduce than if you are poor.

 

Bad nutrition will catch up to you after you've passed normal reproductive age, so people who eat poorly won't get culled from the gene pool.

 

Natural selection, when it comes to how humans eat and how nutritiously they eat, is irrelevant. It could be relevant...but it would be a totally different world in that case, a world where people died all the time from not eating right. Again, basically everybody reproduces, so natural selection is moot on this one.

 

-Woolley

[woolley]

Speaking of Darwinism, I wondered what would happen if they dug up a number of missing links between humans and chimps.

 

Physical anthropologists would stop you here, such links don't exist, although I know you weren't necessarily speaking particuarly. No current evolutionary theories assert that chimps evolved into humans, in case anyone reading this is wondering. But I think you're just using chimps as a colloquial example, I'm not really correcting you.

 

I'm actually not sure if a perfect missing link, say, a link smack dab in the middle, would be able to mate with a human or a chimp. The links would have to be a lot closer to one or the other...in which case you may not actually differentiate them into different species.

 

Woolley

[woolley]

You seem to be saying that natural selection "chooses" the fittest based on phenotype. Woolley seems to be saying natural selection increases fitness over the course of several generations by altering the genotype. Both sentiments are true.

 

In the example, I don't think natural selection chooses anything. It theoretically can, we can even assert that it does in any given scenario, but with nutrition, there is no actual selection.

 

I can think of one possible selection...say, if the healthiest people tend to mate with each other, and the unhealthiest/mal-nutritious people tend to mate with each other. Perhaps, over a really really really long time you can weed out some small percetage of people who, I dunno, will have poor organs or something and will tend to die at early ages, after generation after generation of bad-eating people who devolve.

 

Just to defend the status quo opinion (which I'm actually loathe to do), mainstream evolutionists insist that humans haven't evolved bigger or healthier, but it's simply a result of how humans live their individual lives.

 

I don't know if they necessarily eat healthy in European nations...birth rates are definitely down in Europe. In Asian nations too. There can't even be a parallel asserted between how healthy you eat and how much you reproduce. Anecdotally you can argue that the opposite is true, definitely historically.

 

-Elliot

[Orton's Arm]

Physical anthropologists would stop you here, such links don't exist, although I know you weren't necessarily speaking particuarly. No current evolutionary theories assert that chimps evolved into humans, in case anyone reading this is wondering. But I think you're just using chimps as a colloquial example, I'm not really correcting you.

 

I'm actually not sure if a perfect missing link, say, a link smack dab in the middle, would be able to mate with a human or a chimp. The links would have to be a lot closer to one or the other...in which case you may not actually differentiate them into different species.

 

Woolley

I'll grant your points are true: evolutionary theory asserts that chimps and humans evolved from a common ancestor. It's possible chimps are as genetically different from this common ancestor as are humans. I agree that a species halfway between humans and chimps might well not be able to reproduce with either. On the other hand, lions and tigers can interbreed, housecats can breed with bobcats and even lynxes, horses can (sort of) breed with donkeys.

 

The scenario I envisioned would have the most human-like of the various species breeding with humans; and the most chimp-like breeding with chimps. You'd need a few other human-chimp links in the middle of this chain if the goal was to ultimately mix human blood with chimp blood. Or you could just breed Bungee Jumper.

[ieatcrayonz]

On the other hand, lions and tigers can interbreed, housecats can breed with bobcats and even lynxes, horses can (sort of) breed with donkeys.

I think this begins to explain why at least one of your parents has antlers.

[woolley]

Let me give this another shot...

 

A lot of talk about how humans are evolving...but it's not Darwinian, or neo-Darwinian evolution that we are talking about.

 

In many parts of the world, you still have at least relatively high death rates, high infant morality, people who don't live long enough to reproduce. But that has nothing to do with the quality of one's genetic code. Rather, you could have the best genes imaginable but be born into really horrible conditions, and there's not much you can do.

 

In parts of the world where life is good, you can be a complete genetic waste and have dozens of kids, just watch Jerry Springer. There is no survival of the fittest, the least fit are often subsidized and welfared into a situation where they would be declared evolutionary fit (they live, they reproduce, and so do their progeny).

 

And then you have nations where birth rates are plummeting because "highly evolved" people have decided that it's better to not have kids than to have kids, or, to just have one kid. From an evolutionary perspective you would not call such persons evolutionary success stories, but in everyday language we do dub such people as evovled.

 

Evolution, for humans, is completely unnatural, or completely detached from the most basic, naturalistic, materialistic Darwinian understanding. Technology has overriden Darwinian evolution. Genetic evolutionary success has as much to do with what genes are more successful as what genes are less successful.

 

In the wild, most animals die young. But people no longer die young. If everybody lives to be old, the genetic pool will remain basically stagnant. In the wild, if some animals are genetically resistant or a disease, those animals will surivive and thus the speicies will survive. With humans, we conquer disease by technology, not by survival of the fittest.

 

Sci-fi types have all these conceptions about how we'll look 1000 years from now based on evolution, and I say naturalistic evolution wil lhave nothing to do with it. You'll have more blending between different races, but all human genetic advances will have everything to do with what our brains can do and create and nothing to do with random genetic shuffling, the mutation that miraculously survives, or forces of nature which wipe out large portions of the population because of genetic inadequacies.

 

Modern Darwininan philosophers often assert that this is an absolute triumph for man. That we have transcended Darwinism. That morality can only exist once you've overcome survival of the fittest, made it irrelevant. -Woolley

[DC Tom]

Let me give this another shot...

 

A lot of talk about how humans are evolving...but it's not Darwinian, or neo-Darwinian evolution that we are talking about.

 

In many parts of the world, you still have at least relatively high death rates, high infant morality, people who don't live long enough to reproduce. But that has nothing to do with the quality of one's genetic code. Rather, you could have the best genes imaginable but be born into really horrible conditions, and there's not much you can do.

 

In parts of the world where life is good, you can be a complete genetic waste and have dozens of kids, just watch Jerry Springer. There is no survival of the fittest, the least fit are often subsidized and welfared into a situation where they would be declared evolutionary fit (they live, they reproduce, and so do their progeny).

 

[...further mental retardation omitted...]

 

Evolution isn't a progression from lower to higher forms of life. It's the environmentally-based selection of traits best suited to survival in that environment. In other words, if you're born into really horrible conditions, the phenotype most able to survive those horrible conditions will be selected for more often than not.

 

There's no absolute measure of "genetic quality", despite the drivel morons like you and Holcomb's Arm keep shoveling. The only measure of genetic success is how well it survives in the environment in which it is placed. Period. If you don't believe me, tie lead weights to your feet, jump in the ocean, and ask the nearest fish which one of you has more "genetic quality".

[woolley]

Evolution isn't a progression from lower to higher forms of life. It's the environmentally-based selection of traits best suited to survival in that environment. In other words, if you're born into really horrible conditions, the phenotype most able to survive those horrible conditions will be selected for more often than not.

 

My point is that for humas, this is no longer relevant.

 

There's no absolute measure of "genetic quality", despite the drivel morons like you and Holcomb's Arm keep shoveling.

Agreed, I'm sorry you assume, or have read into, me proposing that.

 

In regards to Springer types, my idea is that minus technology, this would be relevant, as intelligence and general health concerns would come into play.

 

The only measure of genetic success is how well it survives in the environment in which it is placed. Period.

 

Agreed, and my point is that today all humans are genetically successful. My point, furthermore, is how we talk about "evolved" when it comes to humans has nothing to do with Darwinian evolution.

 

Thanks. -Woolley