Life may be getting better at evolving
bbc.com
bbc.com
Evolution has its hands on so many different biological processes, including itself. Nature is astounding.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_far_future#Fut...
Even if we have a horrible nuclear war that kills all humans it will only take 100-200 million years for another highly intelligent species to come back and take over again. We've got around five kicks at the can before it's too late.
Well, that's a mistake right there: All life on this planet has been evolving for the same amount of time[0]. Every organism, every species extant today has already beaten incredible odds to avoid extinction (arguably the only true long term measure of success). None of us are any more or less "evolved" than any other.
[0] Of course, if instead of "time" we consider "generations" to be the correct measure of evolution, than all us multicellular eukaryotes are lagging the prokaryotes so much that we need to describe the number of orders of magnitude we're behind using powers of ten.
That is, unless we decide to forfeit by nuking ourselves out of existence.
[0] - Here meaning non-human-directed part of evolution; technically, all humans and everything they do are part of nature too.
This isn't true. Almost all mutations are either harmful or neutral, so any such gene grouping would be selected against.
Admittedly this is a contentious topic and there are many people who dispute that natural selection can ever occur at the group level. However, if you do buy the premise behind group-selection, a similar argument can be made for the success of genes that improve evolution.
It's also worth considering that the "marketplace of nature" isn't as cut-throat as you're presenting it to be. There's enough inefficiencies in the ecosystem, to allow for imperfect organisms to survive. Imperfect organisms that have sufficient "slack" to "invest/divert" into genes that don't produce an immediate payout, but do snowball in the long-term.
However on an individual level, DNA repair is highly selected for. Any individual with lower mutation rates is much less likely to die of cancer. Much less likely to have offspring with harmful genetic disorders. After all, the vast majority of mutations are either neutral or harmful, not beneficial. So individuals with the repair gene will tend to have more successful offspring than organisms without, and the frequency of the gene will increase.
Most genes that could improve evolution itself are not selected for. Individual fitness matters, not group fitness.
There are other ways evolution hurts itself. For instance there is a condition in mice that lives on the male chromosome. It causes all of it's offspring to be male. So all of them also carry this condition. Thus the condition spreads itself twice as much as the competing genes. And so it quickly fixes itself in the population and then there are no more females.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deinococcus_radiodurans#Ionizi...
Further, we've observed that in many cases the mutations tend to be in the genes that are most closely related to the change. That is, if the PH drops to the point it is causing mutations, many bacteria will tend to get those mutations in genes that are likely to increase tolerance for acidity!
Now that is what I call evolved evolvability.
Only if the offspring of regular males can't compete well enough to keep producing females! I don't recall the name offhand, but there is a species complex of fish that live stably in a similar situation- effectively, there is one species that consists of normal males and females, and another species that consists solely of males which parasitizes the other's females for reproduction, and thus steals genes from the "normal" species.
It is not at all guaranteed that this condition would lead to the extinction of a population unless that population was of trivial size (and therefore unstable). Consider that as the fraction of males in a population goes to 1, the reproductive success of males goes to 0 and the reproductive success of females goes to 1. Therefore we should expect that there will be an extremely strong selective pressure on producing female offspring in greater and greater proportion.
One possible solution is that a normal male may have a distinctive feature that a percent of females find attractive which could be selected for.
You can try it in computer simulations if you like. It would be trivial to set up. Each generation the percent of normal males decreases. Eventually they are all gone.
Unless, of course, you consider those aids as part of the system.
For example thanks to vaccines etc. we accelerated immunity drastically. Diseases also spread faster, but until now have been winning quite easily.
And we haven't really started to directly improve ourselves. If you look at this from the perspective of evolution (where 1000 years are not a lot) it seems we are very, very close to achieving this. I would guess this will accelerate Adaptation by some magnitudes.
Since we can eat, we don't have to produce energy using sunlight like plants do.
Is that a good thing or a bad thing?
For example, you could then go on to say that medicines also form part of the system since we invented them. But then the conclusion of such a discussion would not involve our natural & unconscious attributes (in this case, our natural ability to fight of disease), which surely are the things that more define us (evolutionary) than individual acts (eg. Invent a medicine).
I say define us more, due to this:
If 2 babies are born identical, with identical potential for/intelligence, and 1 of them does not end up being nurtured etc, then even those 2 humans are completely different individuals at age 50, at age 0, it would be reasonable to say that they are evolutionary identical (however, it would open to debate if those two 50 year old individuals could be called evolutionary equal). The "act" in this case would be "nurturing that intelligence".
So in my opinion, there is such a thing as "peak humanity". The point at which we make life so easy for ourselves, that we start to erode the very evolutionary qualities that define us, evolutionary speaking. Case in point - me sitting typing at a computer 8hrs+ per day, rather than out hunting for food. This has had catastrophic negative effects on my health and who knows if any of that was passed down to my sons sons sons sons....I (and they) will never know because evolution works on scale we cannot fathom. And even if we could capture the delta, we have no means of measuring it.
Same reason why all the fish at the bottom of the ocean are blind.
1: It removes the need for saving a lot of information in the gene.
I remember reading as a kid that in many ways mammals have a vastly simplified genome compared to amphibians. Why? Because we only need to encode enzymes that work for a small range of temperatures, whereas amphibians need to be much more adaptable. I think human culture could have a similar simplification effect on our genome.
2: Our evolution is no longer bound to our genes
We can adapt faster than genetic mutation, and you could consider that cultural adaptability a form evolvability as well. We're basically the first "general purpose" species!
3: Being a social species (a fundamental part of being cultural) encourages diversification
Imagine a sports event where there are five completely different types of individual sports being played. Now let's say peak performance is defined as how good you can get by spending 100% of your training time on it, and that the Pareto Principle applies in the sense that you can reach 80% of peak performance in one sport by spending 20% of your training time on it. Not an unrealistic scenario, right?
People also join in teams of ten. Now imagine two ways of how those teams are graded: the first sums up the average performance of the team per sport, the second sums up the best individual performance per sport.
In the first case, the optimal strategy is having allrounders. In the second case, the optimal strategy (assuming nobody gets injuries) is to have one specialist per sport.
What I'm saying is that being social species means our selection pressure leans towards the second situation: we collaborate, so any group is as best, as its best individual specialists working together. Meaning human groups have selection pressure towards specialisation, and thus diversification.
(Or like you said, it's part of the system)
Bit of a sticking point, and what follows is less than convincing. This feels like the biological equivalent of Conformal Cyclic Cosmology; a neat idea, that seems to be pretty disconnected from reality.
Seriously though, if the trend of species 'remembering' old genes and becoming more agile in throwing them into the mix continues, could we wind up with monstrous horripilating beasts capable of directing their own morphology? Or as Lovecraft put it,
"It was a terrible, indescribable thing vaster than any subway train—a shapeless congeries of protoplasmic bubbles, faintly self-luminous, and with myriads of temporary eyes forming and un-forming as pustules of greenish light all over the tunnel-filling front that bore down upon us, crushing the frantic penguins and slithering over the glistening floor that it and its kind had swept so evilly free of all litter."
There are plenty of organisms that have extremely free body plans that can be altered as they grow, however (notably, most plants and fungi), so it's less of a stretch to imagine a creature that could consciously direct changes in its own morphology over long periods of time- equivalent to how long it would take the new structures to grow anyway, if they were a set part of a normal animal's morphology.
If we consider cultural (memetic) evolution as a type of evolution, then the answer is YES!
I don't think we will even manage to get ourselves extinct, though a great deal of needless suffering is pretty much innevitable at this point.