Modern Humans And Evolution

[Politesse]

I feel like there is a flawed assumption underneath the discussion: that human traits like creativity, culture, and technology are "unnatural", and that this makes their influence therefore not a part of "natural" selection. Being successful for a million years because we developed very complex brains is interesting, but trilobites accomplished a longer run and a wider geographical distribution just by developing a really good carapace. How is a brain any less a natural organ than an exoskeleton? They are both interesting combinations of carbon with survival consequences for their hosts. If our influence is still expanding, nature is still "selecting" that trait. If we end up blowing ourselves up or exhausting our food sources, nature will "select" against it.

 

[untermensche]

The "survival of traits that never survived before, only because of a human invention" has been going on for as long as there are humans -- everyone alive is the product of it.

Not true at all.

Humans survived in the environments they had evolved in without any invention.

Invention made life easier not possible.

 

[Random Person]

The "survival of traits that never survived before, only because of a human invention" has been going on for as long as there are humans -- everyone alive is the product of it.

Not true at all.

Humans survived in the environments they had evolved in without any invention.

Invention made life easier not possible.

Invention is part of human evolution isn't it?

 

[untermensche]

I feel like there is a flawed assumption underneath the discussion: that human traits like creativity, culture, and technology are "unnatural", and that this makes their influence therefore not a part of "natural" selection. Being successful for a million years because we developed very complex brains is interesting, but trilobites accomplished a longer run and a wider geographical distribution just by developing a really good carapace. How is a brain any less a natural organ than an exoskeleton? They are both interesting combinations of carbon with survival consequences for their hosts. If our influence is still expanding, nature is still "selecting" that trait. If we end up blowing ourselves up or exhausting our food sources, nature will "select" against it.

A nest is a natural occurring object.

All members of a species of bird can build one.

Is the discovery of insulin something all humans can do?

Or is it something only a rare person could do?

 

[untermensche]

The "survival of traits that never survived before, only because of a human invention" has been going on for as long as there are humans -- everyone alive is the product of it.

Not true at all.

Humans survived in the environments they had evolved in without any invention.

Invention made life easier not possible.

Invention is part of human evolution isn't it?

Human invention is capricious and rare.

How it occurs is unknown.

How some human gets a new idea is unknown.

 

[Random Person]

Invention is part of human evolution isn't it?

Human invention is capricious and rare.

How it occurs is unknown.

How some human gets a new idea is unknown.

I wasn't referring to the process of invention. I was referring to the benefits. Humans enhance the natural world to make it more hospitable.

 

[untermensche]

Invention is part of human evolution isn't it?

Human invention is capricious and rare.

How it occurs is unknown.

How some human gets a new idea is unknown.

I wasn't referring to the process of invention. I was referring to the benefits. Humans enhance the natural world to make it more hospitable.

They are also destroying the natural world and making it less hospitable.

Human progress is not all for the benefit of the species.

It is going to end the species.

But my point was about natural selection.

It is a process where some organisms survive and some do not.

But are the products of the human intellect also natural selection?

Or do they arise by a different process?

This really gets down to the idea of the human will.

Is the human will a determined or free process?

 

[Random Person]

I wasn't referring to the process of invention. I was referring to the benefits. Humans enhance the natural world to make it more hospitable.

They are also destroying the natural world and making it less hospitable.

Human progress is not all for the benefit of the species.

It is going to end the species.

But my point was about natural selection.

It is a process where some organisms survive and some do not.

But are the products of the human intellect also natural selection?

Or do they arise by a different process?

This really gets down to the idea of the human will.

Is the human will a determined or free process?

If the species is going to destroy itself, what difference between freedom and determinism?

 

[untermensche]

If the species is going to destroy itself, what difference between freedom and determinism?

Good point.

Many people have said that intelligence is a lethal mutation.

 

[Jokodo]

The "survival of traits that never survived before, only because of a human invention" has been going on for as long as there are humans -- everyone alive is the product of it.

Not true at all.

Humans survived in the environments they had evolved in without any invention.

Invention made life easier not possible.

If invention made life "easier not possible", it should bee trivial to name one environment on the globe in which a sole human could survive for a year without tools, without fire, without the use of knowledge passed down from others!

The fact that you can't do so shows that invention makes life possible. To some degree, this holds for other species too. Many species reintroduction programs have failed because captivity-raised individuals simply lack the (acquired) skills it takes to survive in the wild.

 

[Jokodo]

I wasn't referring to the process of invention. I was referring to the benefits. Humans enhance the natural world to make it more hospitable.

They are also destroying the natural world and making it less hospitable.

This is plain wrong. A world in which bovines are docile enough to let humans come close enough to milk them and in which grass seeds grow to ten times the size they used to, and in which artificial caves with a stable temperature year-round abound is clearly more hospitable to humans than a world without these.

Human progress is not all for the benefit of the species.

It is going to end the species.

This may or may not be so in the long run, but that's a different question entirely. And if true, it wouldn't set humans set apart from other species either. A lot of species have gone extinct after changing their environment to the worse (especially in insular environments when a population spike easily leads to resource depletion.

But my point was about natural selection.

It is a process where some organisms survive and some do not.

But are the products of the human intellect also natural selection?

They're part of the environment in which natural selection occurs.

Or do they arise by a different process?

This really gets down to the idea of the human will.

Is the human will a determined or free process?

What does that have to do with anything.

 

[untermensche]

If invention made life "easier not possible", it should bee trivial to name one environment on the globe in which a sole human could survive for a year without tools, without fire, without the use of knowledge passed down from others!

No. The burden is on YOU to prove invention made survival possible.

There are plants and insects to just pluck from the ground.

It takes knowing which plants to eat.

This is knowledge, not invention.

 

[untermensche]

This is plain wrong. A world in which bovines are docile enough to let humans come close enough to milk them and in which grass seeds grow to ten times the size they used to, and in which artificial caves with a stable temperature year-round abound is clearly more hospitable to humans than a world without these.

We also have a world that is warming. A world with less and less drinkable water. A world being polluted in many ways. Species disappearing. Environments disappearing.

Which if it continues will drive the human species, and a lot more, including cows, to extinction.

And of course we also have apes like Trump, and worse, in control of nuclear weapons.

But are the products of the human intellect also natural selection?

They're part of the environment in which natural selection occurs.

Is it a "natural" environment?

Or is it an artificial environment that can only arise after a human mind arises?

Is the human mind, with knowledge that accumulates and technologies that develop, a change to the whole process? The creation of a different process. That is the question.

Is the human will a determined or free process?

What does that have to do with anything.

It is a question about the idea of a "natural environment".

As opposed to a planned environment.

The termite does not plan it's structures. They just grow within a set parameter. No two are the same thing.

No two bee hives are identical.

The idea of identical objects.

Is the ability to create two identical objects a break from a "natural" environment?

 

[Politesse]

I feel like there is a flawed assumption underneath the discussion: that human traits like creativity, culture, and technology are "unnatural", and that this makes their influence therefore not a part of "natural" selection. Being successful for a million years because we developed very complex brains is interesting, but trilobites accomplished a longer run and a wider geographical distribution just by developing a really good carapace. How is a brain any less a natural organ than an exoskeleton? They are both interesting combinations of carbon with survival consequences for their hosts. If our influence is still expanding, nature is still "selecting" that trait. If we end up blowing ourselves up or exhausting our food sources, nature will "select" against it.

A nest is a natural occurring object.

All members of a species of bird can build one.

Is the discovery of insulin something all humans can do?

Or is it something only a rare person could do?

Innovating a new object or strategy to deal with a novel situation is an inherently human thing to do, and our brains prime us to both experiment individually and collectively process the knowledge gained. The discovery of insulin is a demonstration of both qualities, as it was the work of a great many people over the course of several generations; several centuries of study, encoded in culture and language and passed along between interested persons in similar environments. Langerhans may get credit (fairly) for launching the modern inquiry into the hormone, but it is not as though he was sitting naked on the savannah and suddenly invented the microscope, centuries of anatomical study, existing theories about the functioning of cells, etcetera. Nor was he the one to apply an expanding knowledge of bodily sugars to the question of his "funny little cells", nor the first to turn the knowledge into a practical means of medicine. How can you portray as a rare flash of individual brilliance something that took thousands of people to accomplish? And that any human, given the apparatus, circumstances, and motivation, is equally capable of observing? I do think that having all three of those circumstances met is a rare occurrence, but not because those it happens to are somehow outside the normal range of potential for our species. If Langerhans had been the only person able to see and speculate about the role of insulin, no one would have believed him or cared about his claims; singular, indemonstrable observations are not the way of science. Scientific observations are elevated from other claims by the very fact that any human, should they correctly reproduce the conditions of the original observation, will be able to observe the same thing.

 

[untermensche]

That explains a lot but I get back to the idea of identical created objects.

To a human this seems trivial.

But in the rest of nature there are no created identical objects. There are only similar objects.

This is a deep philosophical point. Something better for a philosophy thread then a science thread.

But it is a real distinction.

 

[Jokodo]

I feel like there is a flawed assumption underneath the discussion: that human traits like creativity, culture, and technology are "unnatural", and that this makes their influence therefore not a part of "natural" selection. Being successful for a million years because we developed very complex brains is interesting, but trilobites accomplished a longer run and a wider geographical distribution just by developing a really good carapace. How is a brain any less a natural organ than an exoskeleton? They are both interesting combinations of carbon with survival consequences for their hosts. If our influence is still expanding, nature is still "selecting" that trait. If we end up blowing ourselves up or exhausting our food sources, nature will "select" against it.

A nest is a natural occurring object.

All members of a species of bird can build one.

Is the discovery of insulin something all humans can do?

Or is it something only a rare person could do?

Innovating a new object or strategy to deal with a novel situation is an inherently human thing to do, and our brains prime us to both experiment individually and collectively process the knowledge gained. The discovery of insulin is a demonstration of both qualities, as it was the work of a great many people over the course of several generations; several centuries of study, encoded in culture and language and passed along between interested persons in similar environments. Langerhans may get credit (fairly) for launching the modern inquiry into the hormone, but it is not as though he was sitting naked on the savannah and suddenly invented the microscope, centuries of anatomical study, existing theories about the functioning of cells, etcetera. Nor was he the one to apply an expanding knowledge of bodily sugars to the question of his "funny little cells", nor the first to turn the knowledge into a practical means of medicine. How can you portray as a rare flash of individual brilliance something that took thousands of people to accomplish? And that any human, given the apparatus, circumstances, and motivation, is equally capable of observing? I do think that having all three of those circumstances met is a rare occurrence, but not because those it happens to are somehow outside the normal range of potential for our species. If Langerhans had been the only person able to see and speculate about the role of insulin, no one would have believed him or cared about his claims; singular, indemonstrable observations are not the way of science. Scientific observations are elevated from other claims by the very fact that any human, should they correctly reproduce the conditions of the original observation, will be able to observe the same thing.

All good points. What's even worse for untermensche, though: Even if it were so -- even if insulin were discovered in a singular event through a unique divine spark, it's still no different from fire, hand axes and the knowledge which fruits are edible. All of these are, in his terms, men made entities invented by others without which none of our ancestors for hundreds of thousands of years would have survived to reproduce.

 

[untermensche]

Fire did not allow traits to survive that never survived in any other environment.

Insulin is not like fire at all.

 

[Jokodo]

If invention made life "easier not possible", it should bee trivial to name one environment on the globe in which a sole human could survive for a year without tools, without fire, without the use of knowledge passed down from others!

No. The burden is on YOU to prove invention made survival possible.

There are plants and insects to just pluck from the ground.

It takes knowing which plants to eat.

This is knowledge, not invention.

I just note that you still haven't named one actual environment in which "plants and insects to just pluck from the ground" without a need for tools to extract them or cooking to make them digestible abound year round. Just one. And a little hint: Eden is't an actual place. (Also, yes, vertically transmitted knowledge is a technology in its own right too.)

You are better off admitting that yes, humans have been relying on inventions to survive for since before they were humans, and that those inventions, while they may or may not have allowed the survival of individuals who would have had 0 chance of survival without them, have changed the balance enough that, as a species, we wouldn't be what we are, physically and genetically, without them.

 

[Jokodo]

Fire did not allow traits to survive that never survived in any other environment.

Insulin is not like fire at all.

Fire may or may not have allowed individuals with traits that were reliably lethal before to survive (I'd argue it did), but it very certainly allowed traits to propagate that would have been driven out by the competition without it. It allowed humans to become something they wouldn't have become without it.

 

[Jokodo]

We also have a world that is warming. A world with less and less drinkable water. A world being polluted in many ways. Species disappearing. Environments disappearing.

Which if it continues will drive the human species, and a lot more, including cows, to extinction.

And of course we also have apes like Trump, and worse, in control of nuclear weapons.

That's all talk about hypothetical futures, some of which somewhat more probable, others quite far-fetched. It doesn't do anything to change the fact that the world today is more hospitable to humans than the world 500 years ago, the world 500 years ago was more hospitable to humans than the world 5000 years ago, and the world 5000 years ago was more hospitable to humans than the world 50000 years ago -- in large part due to how humans have been changing it long before insulin came around.

They're part of the environment in which natural selection occurs.

Is it a "natural" environment?

In the sense that everything in it adheres to the laws of nature, sure.

Or is it an artificial environment that can only arise after a human mind arises?

The human mind is itself a natural phenomenon. An "environment that can only arise after a human mind arises" is no less natural than an environment that can only arise after grazing animals arise to keep the shrubs down (all grasslands, basically) or an environment that can only arise after photosynthetic micro-organisms arise releasing vast amount of oxygen into the atmosphere.

Is the human mind, with knowledge that accumulates and technologies that develop, a change to the whole process?

It's an additional factor changing the parameters under which natural selection occurs, no different in kind from the additional factors created before photoautotrophs, insect pollinators, and grazers. The process remains the same: The traits an individual has (both acquired and heritable) influence, along with chance factors, the likelihood of having offspring and the average number of offspring. To the extent that the traits are inherited (or that processes underlying the acquisition are, making it less effortful for some), this changes their distribution in the next generation.

The creation of a different process. That is the question.

Is the human will a determined or free process?

What does that have to do with anything.

It is a question about the idea of a "natural environment".

As opposed to a planned environment.

What "planned environment"? We can't even get a handful of the largest pharmaceutical companies to pool their R&D funds to fight some of the most pressing diseases. We can't even tell first year students with any degree of reliability what academic path they should embark on to guarantee economic success because we have to guestimate what skills will be in demand from one decade to the other.

That's of course unless you believe in the lizardmen.

The termite does not plan it's structures. They just grow within a set parameter. No two are the same thing.

No two bee hives are identical.

The idea of identical objects.

Is the ability to create two identical objects a break from a "natural" environment?

No. Next question?