[stub for offtopicness]
Still an interesting article, though!
Lactase metabolism is new, in the last 19k years. European skin colours and blue eyes appear to be very recent too, maybe 3.5k years.
Almost certainly there are all kinds of super interesting human evolutionary changes that are occurring now, with our huge population that won’t be visible for thousands of years…
[0] at least since this https://johnhawks.net/weblog/our-new-paper-on-why-human-evol...
I don't care about living forever, I just want to see what happens in 10k years. Just out of curiosity.
I think there might be more of these effects.
By suppressing the consequence of genetic predispositions and vulnerabilities, it lets those genes propagate more freely and invisibly than they would have been doing before. It helps individuals and communities today in a way we can't possibly refuse, but sets up the species to become perpetually dependent on an elaborate, brittle medical infrastructure. Genetic engineering and eugenics could eventually address that, but those invite scifi horrors of their own. We seem to have set ourselves into a bit of a trap.
How is this any different than the transition from hunter-gatherers to agriculture caused us to "become perpetually dependent on an elaborate, brittle agricultural infrastructure"?
Agriculture took hold in numerous civilizations and indeed introduced one of the primary threats of collapse for those civilizations. Throughout history, we can see civilizations collapse when their dependence on agriculture faltered, which happened often enough.
But neither the technology (agriculture) nor its failures (blight, famine, etc) were universal and so it hadn't become a threat to the species as a whole.
Modernity, however, has become aggressively global and more successfully universalizing. We not only invite every community into it, we insist they do so for their own good. Further, its technological contrivances (and therefore their brittleness) are more intense because of industrialization and later accelerating technology. As it continues to progress and expand, it brings the whole species into its gamble and raises the stakes of that gamble at the same time.
It's hard to know what genes or traits will be advantageous over the next centuries. The biggest place where our technological advantage still has large gaps that our biology can compensate is disease, and there it's almost random -- a gene that results in a novel protein which is normally advantageous or disadvantageous might have the opposite effect if it makes you exceptionally vulnerable or resistant to a new disease.
It is a bit weird to me that the scientific press doesn't talk more about how evolutionary pressure applies here. I think that people are wary to talk about this because it can end up sounding like social Darwinism, or that they believe "Idiocracy" was a scientific documentary.
But it's inescapable, for example, that education rates are now strongly negatively correlated with fertility. While "level of education" is obviously not inherited genetically, I don't think it's too much of a stretch to hypothesize that genetic factors play a role in someone's educational attainment. And, currently, the more education you get, the less likely you are to reproduce (statistically, of course).
Sex evolved to feel really good because for most of human history having sex would usually, eventually lead to babies. Reliable birth control has fundamentally broken that link. Similarly, when a major factor preventing you from reproducing was starving to death, being smarter or cleverer was an evolutionary advantage. I'd argue that advantage no longer exists.
Another simple anecdote: I recently went to my uncle's funeral, and his family was very religious (Catholic). My father, on the other hand, rejected religion and raised us all atheists. My father has 6 descendants, my uncle 24. Again, "religiosity" is not a genetically inherited trait, but I think it would be foolish to believe genetic predisposition plays 0 role.
I say all this just to highlight that, eventually, the "collapse in birthrates" will take care of itself - people with a strong desire and ability to procreate will outcompete, at least in terms of offspring survival, their peers. This will have a huge, profound effect on world society that most academics are too scared to talk about.
You can easily say that city dwelling is strongly correlated with higher education rates, and higher noise pollution, therefore high noise pollution is strongly negatively correlated with fertility. Correlation doesn't equal causation.
> Reliable birth control has fundamentally broken that link.
Reliable birth control has severely reduced unwanted pregnancy, but there's a whole host of people who would like to have children that can't.
I think you're right for the wrong reasons. Correlation does not equal causation. I think it's very clear it's our modern lifestyle. Our diet. Many of us are over weight. Most of us are sedentary. We're consuming higher percentage alcohol and weed. We're consuming other drugs. There are microplastics in our blood stream and the food we eat. There are chemicals like BPAs that were in our products for years before we removed them. Pollution. The list goes on. I would rule out these factors first before ever considering the idea that evolution is at play.
The fact that you have said this makes me think you have misunderstood my point.
I am not arguing that genetic differences are responsible for any change over the past couple generations. I am strongly arguing that there is now an enormous new selection pressure, i.e. a new factor that strongly affects fertility rates, and over time (and, perhaps a very long time) that genetic inheritance will respond to that selection pressure. That is inherently how evolution works.
People love to say "correlation is not causation", but all evolution really works with in the first place is correlation. That is, the environment changes, and then organisms that happen, through "the genetic lottery", to not be able to reproduce in that new environment are outcompeted by those organisms that do. My argument is that the environment that determines whether humans reproduce has changed drastically over the past ~100 years or so, and that this will affect which genes are likely to be more prevalent in the future. I am not arguing this genetic change has already happened.
Far from inescapable, this is just a phantom of noisy data.
It's easy to find statistically communicative population slices where family size is quite high and so is level of education (ignoring that "level of education" is a culturally specific and disputable measure in the first place).
What we really see is that integration into the modern US/EU-inspired "universal middle class" urban culture, which now spans the globe, seems to correlate with lower birth rates and family sizes. But there are countless factors contributing to what makes that culture unique and that could easily be playing a role in the birth rates and family sizes.
That said, it does suggest that the this "modern" culture needs to induct outsiders in order to maintain its scale since its proving relatively poor at growing its own population among insiders. What that means for the future is unclear, and if you're personally all in the on the "modern", it can easily look concerning or even bleak in the way you describe.
Note also that natural selection is about correlation not causality. If an lab accident blows up MIT, that will select against intelligence, even though intelligence wasn't causal.
I personally have used the word for many years, and have seen it extensively pre-LLM. To me, it’s only a red flag when someone starts producing content that doesn’t match their prior history of writing with a sudden explosion of vocabulary.
So, evolution - just framed correctly.
But you can absolutely see evolution across generations of any animal. Humans included.
We are addicted to stories with protagonists, heroes and villains, and so that's how these stories are framed. But that's the exact opposite of what is happening, and everyone knows it, but apparently we just accept it as inevitable.
You could reword it to say that "moths that were more hidden in soot were more likely to survive." But that doesn't change anything? The individual moths involved had no intention. They did not choose to favor genetics that give them a darker look.
I have a pet peeve, which I’m clearly not articulating well, which is that journalistic coverage of this topic relies on two false metaphors: 1) the products of chance can be described as intentional or directed to a positive destination, and 2) a species over time can be anthropomorphized into an individual who has that intent. “How The Rhine Got His Hide,” that sort of thing. Journalists need a story with protagonists and that’s what happens.
That’s my pet peeve, I don’t expect it to bother everyone the same amount, but that’s what my original post was about.
This gets more complicated with actually living things. That is, if you had "How the Ship of Theseus got its mast," I doubt you would necessarily think of any active choices from the ship. See the same for "how chickens came to lay an egg a day" and you would perhaps think there was a bit more active choice on the chickens of old. Realistically, they were both the result of external choices to the subject.
Will male risk behavior be more similar to female risk behavior, 10000 years from now?
Nowadays, the use-case for masculine bravery is more or less obsolete. It had a purpose when there were wild animals roaming around human habitations, but nowadays it may very well trick a man into becoming a war casualty.
Historians of the future might look back on pro-conscription advocates as those who stood in the way of the modern human.
As the world moves back to increased nationalism, some cultures are increasingly militaristic while others become keyboard warriors. Over evolutionary time, that could create different enough human subspecies? Maybe we'll see Klingons after all.
It sounds like you're using a relatively loose definition here. Masculine bravery is not constrained to only the physical realm.
being brave may still be a quality if it's paired with other qualities
10k years is a lot, try predicting what happens in 10 years..
I know several people who have escaped a war-torn country and had a successful life elsewhere, instead of getting affected by military propaganda, and possibly losing everything just because of other people's territorial conflicts.
Edward R. Murrow
What is it with people nowadays, can't there be at least some room for touching this type of sensitive topic?
My post seems to become a downvote magnet. I just wanted to try an unusual perspective that is seldom talked about.
As for general jingoistic propaganda, it's as old as time. I'd also consider it immoral and irrational. Interesting though, as it benefits societies and not (fighting) individuals, and so should have a complex evolutionary dynamics (maybe like with worker bees). _Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori_.
One especially big confound here is remembering the distinction between having sex and having children. From an evolutionary standpoint, the latter is the only thing which matters and unlike animals humans have contraception which completely changes the situation. From an evolutionary perspective the stereotypical bad boy who’s sleeping around constantly might not have even as many children as the cautious, financially stable guy who is monogamous because the former guy’s partners are looking for fun while the latter’s is intentionally trying to start a family.