Hippies

[t̷s͢uk̕a͡t͜ư]

Any selection criteria would have to be influential before reproductive age. Most smokers only suffer insignificant drawbacks at their prime reproductive age. It could also be that disposition to smoke is not genetic (or genetic enough).

In Japan, the societal pressure to achieve high grades is strong enough to make high schoolers (almost all of whom have not reproduced) commit suicide. We could do well with something like that in America.

[sidke]

In Japan, the societal pressure to achieve high grades is strong enough to make high schoolers (almost all of whom have not reproduced) commit suicide. We could do well with something like that in America.

i jokingly but not-so-jokingly made a suggestion in #n that will be in effect should i arise to supreme dominator and world ruler. that is somehow freezing or otherwise rendering ineffective the reproductive systems via a proprietary procedure, that will be reversed only after taking and passing a competency assessment.

but really, i think idiots like hippies shouldn't have kids, and maybe i should attend university and specialize in reproductive sciences to perfect a procedure that does this.

[Geti]

@Scythe, I'm not sure that a definition based on trait movement supports your case. Humans have been anatomically modern for a very long time. Sure, there have been some shifts in superficial details and behaviours, and some physiological shit has happened as well, but I'm fairly certain (though not entirely, as I'm not even an anthropologist much less a paleoanthropologist) that the mean characteristics in the modern human population aren't moving all that fast at all, at least not when compared with anything living in extremely adverse conditions, with more intense selection pressures active.

[scythe]

@Scythe, I'm not sure that a definition based on trait movement supports your case. Humans have been anatomically modern for a very long time. Sure, there have been some shifts in superficial details and behaviours, and some physiological shit has happened as well, but I'm fairly certain (though not entirely, as I'm not even an anthropologist much less a paleoanthropologist) that the mean characteristics in the modern human population aren't moving all that fast at all, at least not when compared with anything living in extremely adverse conditions, with more intense selection pressures active.

Meaningful evolution (in megafauna) hasn't ever happened on a scale that's measurable over a thousand years. I'd wager the genetic makeup of today's humans is more different from that of humans 10000 years ago than is the genetic makeup of the latter group different from humans 20000 years ago. It's not about more intense selective pressures, it's about different selective pressures; and the ones that are at play right now are unlike anything the human race has ever seen before. I'm not even sure what they are.

[Geti]

Sure, it's not the actual paper but it's interesting enough. It's things like that that (as well as every extremophile species on the planet, such as the sulphur-dwelling chemosynthetic snottite bacteria colonies that process H2S into H2SO4 and live in it, just about any deep-sea fish you can find, or hell, even boring things like olms) that cause me to believe that having a more weighty pressure leads to faster, more dramatic phenotypic (sp?/correct word?) change. It's quite hard to comment on genetic diversity, especially when talking about archaic spp., so I feel your wager is most likely conjecture in any case (though most of this is, so that's probably some form of fallacy on my part)

[scythe]

That article supports my contention. The lizards, in an environment unlike the one they evolved in, changed rapidly. Humanity is currently in an environment similarly unlike that which it evolved in. Here's me being right:

http://www.scientificamerican.com/artic ... -evolution
http://johnhawks.net/weblog/topics/evol ... _2007.html
http://www.world-science.net/exclusives ... lution.htm
http://scienceblogs.com/gregladen/2008/ ... d_rate.php
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSN1043228620071210
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/11/science/11gene.html

Those are the top six Google hits for "present rate of human evolution". They all support me.

[Geti]

Sweet, cheers for more reading, I'm very likely behind the times. My comment on conjecture was related to the fact that ancient DNA gives us incredibly inconclusive evidence towards any of that because it's very rarely preserved in any form, much less a usable one, so all we have to go on is (for example) comparisons to variation in our modern relatives. There's no hard proof of a higher rate of mutation; good arguments can be made to support it, but you can't know for sure. Noone took DNA samples and preserved them 40k years ago.

I was also referring to this point

Meaningful evolution (in megafauna) hasn't ever happened on a scale that's measurable over a thousand years.

not the one about different pressures.

I'd still argue that the intensity of the selection pressure is more important for evolution, but we're kind of off the subject of hippies now. -> new topic, or leave it? I'm quite interested in this kind of thing and happy to continue discussion, though admittedly I'm working from a limited educational standpoint what with being in my last stretch of high school and all.