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by gweinberg 5 days ago
"Most research during the past two decades hinted that human evolution has largely slowed or changed so subtly that existing tools couldn’t detect it; evidence seemed to suggest that civilization put humans beyond the reach of natural selection."

There has never been the slightest shred of evidence to that effect, anywhere, ever.
1 comments
ASalazarMX 5 days ago
It's logical. Survival of the fittest was initially driven by the environment; then we formed civilizations, and culture influenced what "fittest" was. Now we have technology that defines the "fittest" further. The urban fittest of the future could end up being people succesful enough to pay for advanced medicine.

Evolution still happens when creatures reproduce at different ratios, but civilization and tech allows people to survive and/or reproduce when they naturally wouldn't.

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vinceguidry 5 days ago
I love it. Claim gets made, it's pointed out that there's no evidence for said claim, claim gets justified anyway with some version of "it's logical / rational / stands to reason."

All it amounts to is 'sounds good to me'.

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ASalazarMX 4 days ago
It doesn't just "sound good to me", you can watch culture and technology influence reproduction, the main driving force of evolution.

For example, today we can sit for hours and thrive, while a hunter-gatherer or farmer would starve sitting around all day. Our bodies protest, but we manage to reproduce, and treat or palliate the ailments that come with sedentarism. We surely are evolving to better tolerate sedentarism, but it's slowed down because medicine allow the unfit to sedentarism to survive and reproduce instead of dying early.

You can see the delay of evolution, allowing the biologically unfit to reproduce, at any hospital. Medicine saves or prolongs more lives than ever, and death is the second driving force of evolution. Stephen Hawkins, for example, was diagnosed with ALS and given two years to live, and despite that he had three descendants years after. He couldn't do physical work, but could do great mental work, which our society values.

You can correctly argue that our civilization is part of the environment, though. In that case, natural evolution isn't slowing down, it's just going in a different direction than it used to.

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