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Goodbye Jesus

Natural Selection


KT45

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The latest natural selection with humans, as I see it, is with metabolism and our fat laden diet. Those who don't have high metabolisms are dying off. This culling is what shapes species. It was the opposite for eons. In places where food was scarce, the high metabolisms died off and the more heavy, slower types proliferated. Another would be with head, and hence brain, size. There was a restriction on the size of head that could fit through theb hips and out of a vagina. Now, with the massive success and popularity of the c-section, larger brained humans could easily come to be. We also tend to be going toward less and less hair on our bodies. These are all very easy things for evolution accomplish.

 

Most people in the world still need their high metabolism, it's only in Western and developed countries that we have plenty to eat. Also, C-sections are not available to everyone in the world. Would it be possible for humans to eventually evolve into different types of humans? Also, the humans who do not have access to Western medical advances and diet will evolve faster since they produce more children and at younger ages.

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If you haven't, I'd pick up Ancestor's Tale. I found it much more informative in the way of evolution because he uses a backwards chrnology and it really helps one to envision the process! He even goes back to all the hypotheses regarding chemical evolution or abiogenesis! He takes his time to describe all the latest scientific evidence for each position, too. It's a wonderful read.

 

Yeah, I second that. I've only started reading it in the past couple of weeks, just when college started back up again, so I've only gotten about 160 pages into it (it's Dawkins' biggest book, at over 600 pages). I wish I could read more (and more often, for that matter), but unfortunately studying takes precedence (but it's not too bad...one of the classes I'm taking is Evolutionary Biology!). But anyway, in typical Dawkins fashion, it is meticulously written in order to really get a clear message across to the reader. It's bad-ass so far.

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If you haven't, I'd pick up Ancestor's Tale. I found it much more informative in the way of evolution because he uses a backwards chrnology and it really helps one to envision the process! He even goes back to all the hypotheses regarding chemical evolution or abiogenesis! He takes his time to describe all the latest scientific evidence for each position, too. It's a wonderful read.

 

Yeah, I second that. I've only started reading it in the past couple of weeks, just when college started back up again, so I've only gotten about 160 pages into it (it's Dawkins' biggest book, at over 600 pages). I wish I could read more (and more often, for that matter), but unfortunately studying takes precedence (but it's not too bad...one of the classes I'm taking is Evolutionary Biology!). But anyway, in typical Dawkins fashion, it is meticulously written in order to really get a clear message across to the reader. It's bad-ass so far.

 

What I've done, because of my constant time constraints (my son just started to go to preschool and so another ball was added to the juggle), is skip around from rendevous point to rendevous point, reading them out of order, but rather in order of most interesting. It's unconventional and against the point of the book, but I know roughly where the animals belong in evolutionary history and so it really doesn't matter.

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The latest natural selection with humans, as I see it, is with metabolism and our fat laden diet. Those who don't have high metabolisms are dying off. This culling is what shapes species. It was the opposite for eons. In places where food was scarce, the high metabolisms died off and the more heavy, slower types proliferated. Another would be with head, and hence brain, size. There was a restriction on the size of head that could fit through theb hips and out of a vagina. Now, with the massive success and popularity of the c-section, larger brained humans could easily come to be. We also tend to be going toward less and less hair on our bodies. These are all very easy things for evolution accomplish.

 

Most people in the world still need their high metabolism, it's only in Western and developed countries that we have plenty to eat. Also, C-sections are not available to everyone in the world. Would it be possible for humans to eventually evolve into different types of humans? Also, the humans who do not have access to Western medical advances and diet will evolve faster since they produce more children and at younger ages.

 

I can see no reason why speciation with humans would be impossible. Geographic isolation and differing environmental pressure typically leads to a parent species splitting into two or more. Our eventual colonization of other planets would qualify for such an event. It'd just be a matter of time.

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I can see no reason why speciation with humans would be impossible. Geographic isolation and differing environmental pressure typically leads to a parent species splitting into two or more. Our eventual colonization of other planets would qualify for such an event. It'd just be a matter of time.

I think that it would take colonizing other planets because of globalization. No one is isolated anymore. Another difficulty would be that humans tend to adapt our enviroment to ourselves instead of the other way around. It's almost a reverse natural selection.

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I can see no reason why speciation with humans would be impossible. Geographic isolation and differing environmental pressure typically leads to a parent species splitting into two or more. Our eventual colonization of other planets would qualify for such an event. It'd just be a matter of time.

I think that it would take colonizing other planets because of globalization. No one is isolated anymore. Another difficulty would be that humans tend to adapt our enviroment to ourselves instead of the other way around. It's almost a reverse natural selection.

 

Yeah, our brains are so large that we really don't need natural selection to change anything any more.. But just as freakishly tall humans have their selective advantages and numerous breeding oppurtunities (think basketball players), new environmental challenges would make some more suitable than others. Whether this would lead to speciation, though, is debateable. At the very least, though, it would push human genetic variation to another level!

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