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Evolution is broken

Name: Anonymous 2006-12-16 20:34

Evolution requires that the strongest of the species reproduce more than the weakest, which is not the case for the human race where nearly everyone survives to reproduce.  Statistically, wealth and #of children have a loose negative correlation which probably is resulting in genetic regression.

I can see four possibilities:
A)War or lack of resources causes survival rate to drop sufficiently for evolution to work
B)Genetic Engineering progresses far enough that we can improve the human genome manually
C)New social reproduction norms such as polygamy or government controlled breeding restrict reproduction to people with superior genomes
D)Sudden extinction causes human race to go extinct before evolving (ie global thermonuclear war, supernova)

Which scenario do you prefer and which do think is most likely.  I would prefer B but A is probably more likely.  If you can think of other like scenarios, post them.

Name: Anonymous 2006-12-16 21:02

I saw an intense computer simulation of this exact thing, what happens when evolutionary pressures are removed. In short, the species is expected to grow incredibly fast in population (as we see) until it gets close to some population limit, based on food or space. The species will remain there for several dozen hundred generations until the genome is so filled with crap, useless genes, that a giant extinction event will occur where almost every (in the simulations, it WAS every) individual of the species goes extint.

Basically, once every member of the species is a fat, unhealthy blob, once they start to die off because they can't even artificially remain alive any more, then the population density decreases and it makes it harder for everyone else to reproduce, and in short time they all die out.

Luckily, since there IS a positive coorilation between # of children and coolness-factor/slut-factor, we'll still be evolving, just towards a species of really cool guys and really slutty girls (although both will be fairly dumb).

Could be worse.

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