Originally posted by: yoda291
Originally posted by: Fritzo
Originally posted by: Jehovah
Originally posted by: Kibbo
Humans stopped evolving as soon as we found agriculture. The food surplus (and social interdependence) since then has meant that evolution is no longer a competition between individuals of a species for limited resources, (like turtles, where the individuals with longer necks would thrive), but rather where societies as a whole will compete. IE, our taxation of freely produced goods will buy more cruise missles than your slave labour system (or vice versa) and will gain the (insert uranium, oil, albumin, or salt here).
We are running 21st century software on 10 thousand year old hardware, and the only way out (we can see from here) is to apply 22nd century software to that same hardware. Of course, the initial procedure will still be guided by apes.
What kind of gibberish are you talking about? Of course humans are still evolving! Just because we have better managed our resources does not mean that we somehow just "stopped evolving altogether"! :roll:
No...he's somewhat correct. I'll add to that practicing medicine has also slowed human evolution to a crawl. There's no more survival of the fittest. In the wilderness, people with physical handicaps, poor eyesight, and other defects would most likely not survive, and they surely would not be able to compete to reproduce. Medical science has allowed people with damaged genes and defects to keep passing them along, therefore eliminating "survival of the fittest" from human evolution. Now, you can't say it's completely stopped, because agriculture is actually making us larger. The average human male today is something like 9-12" taller than the average male 2000 years ago (I don't remember the exact figure).
hrm, actually, all it means is that the environment has changed the requirements of survival. Physical handicaps like poor eyesight, lesser coordination no longer have such a large importance in terms of survival. Nowadays, something like increased cranial capacity, raised intelligence, stronger mental, social, and analytical ability tend to dictate the a higher standard of living and really, people with defects are still less likely to reproduce than otherwise normally endowed people. Given a long enough timeline, it's likely many defects will be strained out and those that are left will no longer have significant impact on life.
