[R. S. Martin]

Human Life--Evolution to Self Evolution

• Video 1 http://www.youtube.c...90A66CD&index=0
• Video 2 http://www.youtube.c...90A66CD&index=1
• Video 3 http://www.youtube.c...90A66CD&index=2
• Video 4 http://www.youtube.c...90A66CD&index=3
• Video 5 http://www.youtube.c...90A66CD&index=4

This series is the five-million-year story of how humans may have evolved from "tree living apes to modern man." There is only one percent difference between the genes of chimpanzees and humans. The narrator says that if we could take a child born five thousand years ago in the Stone Age and set it in the 21st century, that child could do everything we can today. Also, if we could set a child born today in the Stone Age, that child could do everything people did then. In other words, there is no difference between a child born in the Stone Age and today; there has been no biological evolution in all this time. This agrees with my observation of "ancient man" as portrayed in ancient literature such as the Bible, and in the ancient writings of the Greeks, Chinese, and Hindi.

[highvoltage]

Five-thousand years is not a very long time on an evolutionary time scale. Just because we haven't changed much in the past 5000 years doesn't mean evolution has stopped or even slowed down; it's simply too short of a time. Anatomically modern humans have been around at least 100,000 years (from an anthropology class I took last semester), and the wikipedia entry states a figure of 200,000 years. A more interesting question in my mind would be if we displaced a child back 100,000 years, or brought one of those first "anatomically modern" humans to the present, would he function indistinguishably from the rest of us? Or at what point in human evolution did we arrive at our current cognitive abilities?

[Davka]

Tangent: Since evolution is dependent on environmental pressures for the selection process, what happens to a species when there are no more environmental pressures to change? In most cases, a species perfectly adapted to its niche stagnates, like cockroaches or horseshoe crabs.

Humans got past the point where the natural world could provide much in the way of selection pressure a long time ago. But we seem to be pressuring ourselves now, providing a real existential threat to the future of the species. If it is true that evolution progresses in fits and starts, rather than in a gradual shift, I wonder if the past 5,000 years of human civilization has been, in essence, the beginning of an evolutionary shift? Could it be that the purpose of all the pressure we're exerting on ourselves (and on the planet) is to push us past homo sapiens to a somewhat more advanced species?

IOW, could we be self-selecting at this point?

This post has been edited by Davka: 12 July 2009 - 09:01 PM

[Tabula Rasa]

Great videos R.S Martin! Very interesting about how human beings got their start. Makes me not mind that I might be a monkey's un- hehehe, just kidding.(Knows about the common misconception about humans and monkey's being related.)

Seriously, after watching the video about the eruption of the volcano Toba 75,000 years ago, it made me wonder. If it hadn't erupted, and set off a six year global winter, thereby nearly driving humanity to extinction, would the human race have advanced a lot more if there were more people to explore and learn about the world around them?

[oddbird1963]

Tabula Rasa, on 13 July 2009 - 01:00 AM, said:

Great videos R.S Martin! Very interesting about how human beings got their start. Makes me not mind that I might be a monkey's un- hehehe, just kidding.(Knows about the common misconception about humans and monkey's being related.)

Seriously, after watching the video about the eruption of the volcano Toba 75,000 years ago, it made me wonder. If it hadn't erupted, and set off a six year global winter, thereby nearly driving humanity to extinction, would the human race have advanced a lot more if there were more people to explore and learn about the world around them?

TR,

I thought that scientists believe that the Toba catastrophe created such significant pressure on humanity's survival capability that homo sapiens evolved into homo sapiens sapiens. I've heard it explained that only the most creative, resourceful and best communicators survived and that is what propelled humanity to be the precocious species it is.

So, for me, the question is, "Would we have advanced a lot more slowly?" since there presumably would not have been as great pressure on our species to adapt and survive.

At any rate, you ask a good question.

OB '63

[RationalOkie]

When you visit old buildings and homes in Boston you will find that the average door height was over a foot shorter back in the 1800's. Just a few hundred years ago the average height of a human was about a foot shorter. I'm not a scientist, but isn't this a clue that we ARE still evolving? I bet we have less body hair than the fella's from 5,000 years ago as well.

[Skankboy]

Quote

When you visit old buildings and homes in Boston you will find that the average door height was over a foot shorter back in the 1800's. Just a few hundred years ago the average height of a human was about a foot shorter. I'm not a scientist, but isn't this a clue that we ARE still evolving? I bet we have less body hair than the fella's from 5,000 years ago as well.

Possibly, but I'd say this is just as likely due to better nutrition during the developmental years.

[Davka]

Skankboy, on 13 July 2009 - 03:47 PM, said:

Quote

When you visit old buildings and homes in Boston you will find that the average door height was over a foot shorter back in the 1800's. Just a few hundred years ago the average height of a human was about a foot shorter. I'm not a scientist, but isn't this a clue that we ARE still evolving? I bet we have less body hair than the fella's from 5,000 years ago as well.

Possibly, but I'd say this is just as likely due to better nutrition during the developmental years.

Purely nutritional. Look at Japanese-Americans (raised here) compared to Japanese living in Japan. In Japan, they don't eat nearly as much meat and are significantly shorter than people with the exact same genetic mix raised in America.

[RationalOkie]

Davka, on 13 July 2009 - 04:08 PM, said:

Skankboy, on 13 July 2009 - 03:47 PM, said:

Quote

When you visit old buildings and homes in Boston you will find that the average door height was over a foot shorter back in the 1800's. Just a few hundred years ago the average height of a human was about a foot shorter. I'm not a scientist, but isn't this a clue that we ARE still evolving? I bet we have less body hair than the fella's from 5,000 years ago as well.

Possibly, but I'd say this is just as likely due to better nutrition during the developmental years.

Purely nutritional. Look at Japanese-Americans (raised here) compared to Japanese living in Japan. In Japan, they don't eat nearly as much meat and are significantly shorter than people with the exact same genetic mix raised in America.

O.K., I'm going to call bullshit on my own post. I read up on average heights of humans and I'm an idiot. A lot of that is myth and conjecture. I would have been better off going after the 'Why do Men have nipples?' line of reasoning. My bad.

[Davka]

RationalOkie, on 13 July 2009 - 04:17 PM, said:

Davka, on 13 July 2009 - 04:08 PM, said:

Skankboy, on 13 July 2009 - 03:47 PM, said:

Quote

When you visit old buildings and homes in Boston you will find that the average door height was over a foot shorter back in the 1800's. Just a few hundred years ago the average height of a human was about a foot shorter. I'm not a scientist, but isn't this a clue that we ARE still evolving? I bet we have less body hair than the fella's from 5,000 years ago as well.

Possibly, but I'd say this is just as likely due to better nutrition during the developmental years.

Purely nutritional. Look at Japanese-Americans (raised here) compared to Japanese living in Japan. In Japan, they don't eat nearly as much meat and are significantly shorter than people with the exact same genetic mix raised in America.

O.K., I'm going to call bullshit on my own post. I read up on average heights of humans and I'm an idiot. A lot of that is myth and conjecture. I would have been better off going after the 'Why do Men have nipples?' line of reasoning. My bad.

lol - and Okie pulls a major smackdown on himself!

I feel you, man. I want to see evidence of humans evolving, too. Problem is, evolutionary changes take longer than the mere 5,000 years of human history. It will be a long, long time before humans can look back at written records and say "boy, those proto-humans sure were morons!"

Well, besides the Bible, I mean.

[Tabula Rasa]

RationalOkie, on 13 July 2009 - 04:17 PM, said:

Davka, on 13 July 2009 - 04:08 PM, said:

Skankboy, on 13 July 2009 - 03:47 PM, said:

Quote

When you visit old buildings and homes in Boston you will find that the average door height was over a foot shorter back in the 1800's. Just a few hundred years ago the average height of a human was about a foot shorter. I'm not a scientist, but isn't this a clue that we ARE still evolving? I bet we have less body hair than the fella's from 5,000 years ago as well.

Possibly, but I'd say this is just as likely due to better nutrition during the developmental years.

Purely nutritional. Look at Japanese-Americans (raised here) compared to Japanese living in Japan. In Japan, they don't eat nearly as much meat and are significantly shorter than people with the exact same genetic mix raised in America.

O.K., I'm going to call bullshit on my own post. I read up on average heights of humans and I'm an idiot. A lot of that is myth and conjecture. I would have been better off going after the 'Why do Men have nipples?' line of reasoning. My bad.

Don't be so hard on yourself Okie, the fact that you looked up the info on human height proves you're not an idiot.
An idiot wouldn't try to alleviate his ignorance on a particular subject. Therefore , you're no idiot.

[R. S. Martin]

Come to think of it, five thousand years is a rather short time in evolutionary terms. I grew up in the sixties and was taught by a grey-haired lady of the nineteenth century mind-set that human society can only progress. This was in public school. We were supposedly so much smarter in the 1960s than our forebears of the 1860s had been. WE put man on the moon! THEY didn't even have airplanes. And so went the adult conversations that I heard.

But I did my own thinking. I read the Bible stories because that was the main literature I had access to. The ancient characters were so very much like the people around me in the 1960s. Sometimes they were mad, sometimes they were glad. They had babies, they got old and died. They built buildings, they pulled buildings down. They had animals, they went on trips, and their lives--while quite different from ours--were very much human. Their wise sayings were quite applicable to my own life. The examples set were good and bad by present standards, if you cherry-picked appropriately. I was adept at cherry-picking. The other source of reading available to me was the school readers. The readers were about town children whose lives and dress were just as different from my own as were those of the Bible. The teacher was from town, too.

I could not agree with either my teachers from town or my own people that the people of earlier times were different from the people of our own day. That is where I was coming from. But I realize that five thousand years is rather a short time.

All the same, coming as I do from a closed horse and buggy community that strives to this day to cling to nineteenth century values, styles, and traditions (a condition now made worse by their own school system instituted in the late 1960s), I see much that encourages me in the wider world. It may not be outright evolution, but it certainly is not stagnation so far as the knowledge base of humanity is concerned. Nor does the base of ethics stagnate. See Richard Dawkins on shifting moral zeitgeist. Ethically and intellectually each generation builds on the shoulders of the previous generation. When I entered academia fresh from the horse and buggy community, that is what really hit me between the eyes.

It is true that the masses may not be moving forward as one would wish and hope. I do not know how much, or what kind of, power the religious right will have in our world's future. But when I see an Afro-American in the White House, when I see a very conservative Christian woman contending for the position of President in the Christian world's most religious country, I know that the values of our society have changed on a very deep level from earlier generations. I'm not calling it evolution; I'm calling it change. Evolution is change. I don't think evolution ever took place on a level that could have been observed by the individuals at the time; it can only be seen in retrospect when comparing fossils across vast periods of time.

[Davka]

R.S. - I have suspected for a long time that human society is evolving. This is not the same as human beings evolving, it's not a genetic shift but a shift in the dominant paradigm. Memes appear to evolve quite rapidly, and the process is accelerating as information sharing becomes faster and more widespread.

Now if we could only somehow bypass what seems to be a dumbing-down of the educational system, we might actually get somewhere.

[Skankboy]

I imagine that since isolation and selective pressure due to environmental coniditions are the normal "causes" for evolution, our own has been slowed and/or almost stopped now that we have technology and civilization.

Genetic bloodlines mix these days in a way that was impossible even in the relatively recent past. Societal evolution seems to have replaced physical evolution as the primary driver of change for humans. And since society is a cumulative process (barring disasters that my cause set-backs) it has been accellorating as time has gone by.

Not to say random mutations, etc aren't still going on. But without the reliance on nature that can cause real environmental pressures to be felt on a community and without the necessary isolation to keep that community from interbreeding with others, I think we've reached a kind of stand-still in our physical evolution.

My 2 cents,