Andy Myers has a serious/entertaining FSB piece on the future of human evolution. Well worth reading and while reading it is useful to remember a few of the strange people pretending to be UK political leaders, celebrity 'experts' or media 'personalities'.
The Domestication of Humanity
How AI and technology are quietly rewriting evolution
We bred wolves into pugs. At some point, someone looked at a majestic predator and thought, “What if it had a snub nose, a wheeze, and couldn’t survive a gentle breeze?” Fast-forward a few generations and voilà—a creature designed purely to delight, not to endure.
And now, having reshaped the animal kingdom in our image, we turn the lens inward. What happens when we begin to breed ourselves—not with scissors and genes only, but with the quiet, persistent selection pressures of convenience, code, and comfort?
Welcome to the age of un-natural selection.
We bred wolves into pugs. At some point, someone looked at a majestic predator and thought, “What if it had a snub nose, a wheeze, and couldn’t survive a gentle breeze?” Fast-forward a few generations and voilà—a creature designed purely to delight, not to endure.
And now, having reshaped the animal kingdom in our image, we turn the lens inward. What happens when we begin to breed ourselves—not with scissors and genes only, but with the quiet, persistent selection pressures of convenience, code, and comfort?
Welcome to the age of un-natural selection.
5 comments:
Arguably any herd or troop animal will tend to breed towards an optimum mix of tame and wild animals. Yet the optimum mix will change from time to time.
The developed world and perhaps the less developed world are tending to have fewer children. This seems a risky gamble that may produce generations of children who might survive more frequently to adulthood or maybe is just a diminution of the size of gene pool Time will tell.
But there is no guarantee that a species will 'progress' for ever. Evolutionary processes don't work like that.
Otherwise known, AKH, as messing with nature.
DJ - "But there is no guarantee that a species will 'progress' for ever."
I agree, when life becomes too easy we may drift away from our adaptability. In a number of ways we already seem to be doing that.
James - yes, a lesson nature has yet to teach us but will probably get round to it.
From personal observation.
Intelligent women are putting off breeding until they have established a career.
The drive to insist that every job needs a degree - nursing, policing, armed services, teaching of children of all ages, probably farming and gamekeeping means that more breeding years are slipping by for the people with the IQ to do this. And then there is the gender proliferation where only one pairing out of 50? is going to replace itself.
Meanwhile the rest are encouraged to lead simple lives financed by handouts which increase with every new baby. Which is good. This is reverse Darwinism.
Who is going to have an abortion. The one for whom the new baby is an asset or the career woman for whom it is an inconvenience?
As a society we cannot maintain what our predecessors left us. The knowledge is gone. What can we make that works reliably? Here is a fag packet. Write your list on the back of it. British science and engineering peaked in the 20th Century.
All our combined knowledge is being trusted to volatile memory in energy greedy data banks. One long power cut and It is gone.
One must hopes that somewhere else on the globe there is a society which is normal. We are doomed. Ah tell ye, doo-oomed!
Doonhamer - From personal observation.
You are right. We've lost something and one of the things we've lost is the knowledge of how to recover what we've lost. Perhaps we never did know and merely tried to do 'the right thing' but now we can't recall what it is to try and do 'the right thing'. It's too subtle for us and yes, we are doomed.
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