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[NFossil]

Natural Selection/Evolution is designed to create the perfect organism...

It's not, period.

[cowofdoom78963]

Evolution doesnt really strive to do anything. Mutants are born sometimes, if they are built well then they survive. If their not they dont. Even though they say luck has nothing to do with it I dont see how it doesnt.

[Andir]

Evolution doesnt really strive to do anything. Mutants are born sometimes, if they are built well then they survive. If their not they dont. Even though they say luck has nothing to do with it I dont see how it doesnt.

You can actually see this at times in humans.  In "tight" communities where third cousins and other socially unacceptable matings occur... the kids have a good chance of having webbed fingers/toes due to "hidden" or inactive genetics.  If both parents are from the same branch of the family tree, they will likely activate that gene in their offspring.  One explanation of this type of deformation is to allow the creature (the kid) to move further away from his genetic community... This happens in humans and animals alike.  Evolution doesn't mean perfect.  It means adapting to the environment that you are living in.  Fish that can swim better will be able to swim upstream where they will meet other good swimmers and reproduce giving better swimming fish that will make it further up the stream.  It doesn't mean the fish are closing on perfect beings... it just means they are better suited to the environment they are in.

[Muz]

Hmmmm.. come to think of it, natural selection doesn't create a perfect organism. It gets better and better slowly, but with some drawbacks. Creatures with better healing are more prone to cancer and vice versa. Creatures that are bigger and stronger use more energy than the smaller ones. Etc.

With humans, so far, it's been making them more and more vulnerable at the benefit of an extremely high learning rate. Human babies can never survive on their own, unlike baby turtles. Heck, humans are completely reliant on tools. They don't have a thick hide or sharp teeth or claws. A lot of humans can't even digest uncooked foods. Humans are one of the most pathetic, technology-reliant creatures in the world.

So no, natural selection doesn't really produce the perfect organism.

[Andir]

Yup, the perfect organism would be able to fly, swim, breathe water, breathe air... basically everything.  But evolution is a two way street.  You lose your tail because it's not required anymore.  As we evolve more and more, humans lose hair.  We don't need it except to attract the opposite sex and there's a large group of people that don't select mating partners on hair.  (and those that do, are probably with someone taking medicine to grow hair.)  We evolve to perfection in a given environment (that is if we were allowed to be selective who we date without being ridiculed for judging a person based on the facial deformity or disease bearing status.)  I actually might even go out on a limb and state that our "morals" get in the way of evolution.  It would be an explanation to why the human race hasn't changed much in thousands or hundreds of thousands of years.  I would also go out on a limb and state that I think a good chunk of that is religious belief that we are somehow special or "higher" than the kind of thinking that we should be more selective in mating partners.  That thinking is leaving the human race to stagnate and carry dormant genetics into the present day.  I wouldn't, however, go as far as Hitler in trying to create a master race by killing off those I felt were inferior... just so we are clear on that.

[x2yzh9]

well, lets think about it guys  . Considering our evolution, and our perceived/proven/disproven, whatever you'd like to call it... We're the 'adults' of the universe, considering the universe is something about 8 billions years old, it were about 2 or 1 billion years ahead of all the other organisms, on our scale of how long we took to evolve, so lets be happeh with ourselves, im not saying with religion i belong to, but know this, be happeh  .

[Ampersand]

Evolution has carried us far, but it must be cast off. Our petty instincts carried over from our ancestral genes restrain us, torture us, and make us blow each other up. The common nihilism of people these days is a dangerous force.

[Kagus]

Heh, guess I've been playing a little too much Half-Life 2 lately.  That sounded just like Breen.

And yeah, the genetic future of the human race is a tricky subject.  In order to ensure that only the most "pedigree" specimens reproduce, you'd have to step on a massive number of less-qualified toes.  That's the thing about stuff like that, with presenting the idea you have to accept that you would likely be deemed unfit to reproduce by your own standards...  If you're going to be truly altruistic about it, of course.  And there's the difficulty.

[cerapa]

We fell into an evolutionary hole. We cant evolve claws, cause we dont have anything to evolve them from, and slightly bigger toenails arent gonna help. Our only way to survive was to become smarter. Now, to become smarter we have to be dumber(instincts=common sense). I find it very amusing.

On another note, we are making everything cuter. Why do we save pandas? Cause their so cute and furry! Its an useful trait now.

[Yanlin]

well, lets think about it guys  . Considering our evolution, and our perceived/proven/disproven, whatever you'd like to call it... We're the 'adults' of the universe, considering the universe is something about 8 billions years old, it were about 2 or 1 billion years ahead of all the other organisms, on our scale of how long we took to evolve, so lets be happeh with ourselves, im not saying with religion i belong to, but know this, be happeh  .

13.5-14 billion years old.

[Pandarsenic]

To do that, you must believe that humans are the end, or near end result of Evolution, not a small step in it's process.

Wrong. Evolution does not have an "end" or "destination," it merely allows the creatures best-suited to a particular environment to survive.

If the universe has always existed, then Evolution has already had an infinite amount of time to create a God being.

Impossible. That requires a creature to spontaneously gain power over time and space in ways that are impossible within the bounds of reality.

To say a God doesn't exist, is to deny the scope of Evolution.

Wrong, evolution can only work with what it has available (other than viable mutations)... and there is no indication that a mutation might give you cancer or godhood.

[Eidalac]

Evolution is the change in frequency of a given gene in a given population over time.  This is typically the result of mutation and transposition errors in DNA replication.

Natural Selection is the process by which evolution will give some members of a population an advantages trait that enables them to breed more and thus increase the frequency of that advantageous gene.

Speciation (sp?) is the process by which a population, isolated from a genetically identical population, over time, accumulates enough genetic changes to no longer be genetically compatible with the other population.

Artificial Selection is the process of breeding for a specific traits, such as the domestication of animals by humans.  Those with the desired traits are breed, while those without are excluded from breeding.  This method affects changes far faster than via natural selection or mutation alone.


Now, to deny the existence of evolution is to claim that gene frequency is fixed over time.  This is true in certain asexual life forms, which propagate via a form of cloning.  However, in all sexual species, where the genes of a child are a mix of genes from 2 (or more) parents, the odds of a child being genetically identical to either parent are statistically non-existent.  Even if that were to occur, the presence an extra member of the population with the same genes would change the over-all ratio of genes, which is still evolution.

The only way for evolution not to exist would be for a child to be identical to all parents, and for 1 child to be produced for all parents in all cases.  So far as I know, this only happens in the case of asexual clone reproduction.


Incidentally, at present, humans typically breed for emotional reasons.  It can be reasonably argued that we are not governed by Natural or Artificial selection any longer, though advances in genetics may mean we will be able to affect ourselves via a new form of Selective Artificial Selection, via selecting the genetic makeup of a child directly.

At present, our technology does, and will continue to, change faster then our biology.  Technology has largely replaced all previous forms of adaptive pressure.  We can adapt the climate to our needs, rather than needing to adapt to it.

This is the paradigm of humanity.  We do not change, we effect change ourselves.

Even this may have its limits.

If technology continues to advance at the present rate, we should soon be able to build a true AI.  Soon after that, we will have an AI that is as smart as we are.  Soon after, one will be as smart as the people who built it.  Moments later, it will have built an AI as smart as it, but with the capacity to improve it's own intelligence.

Every second after that moment, that AI will not only become smarter than we can understand, it will become smarter than we can Ever understand.

This basic idea is referred to as the Singularity.  The basic idea is that if the current pace of advancement continues, it will hit an exponential growth curve.

Think about Dwarf Fortress.  Imagine the time between each release was half that of the last.  10 years, then 5 years, then 2.5 years, then 1.25 years, then 7.5 months, then 112.5 days, then 56 days, 28 days, 14 days, 7 days, 3 days, 84 hours, 42 hours, 21 hours, 10 hours, 315 minutes, 157 minutes, 78, 39, 19, 9, 295 seconds, 148, 74, 37, 18, 9... less than 5 seconds for version 27 to be out.

By the time you downloaded v21, v27 would be out.  By the time you refreshed the page to see that, it would be ... well past the 30s.

Since people can't learn at an exponential rate, and since even Toady is not *that* good, this concept generally comes down to an AI which can improve itself, or any other self replicating tech that can express an internal and self regulated form of selection.

It has no need to evolve via breeding, it can evolve by directly changing it's own genes, and can do so faster than you or I can dye our hair.

We can't even conceptually keep up.

Once any form of tech hits this singularity, it is forever beyond our ability to grasp.  Even if we had a way to make our selves exponentially smarter, if we did so even 1 second after the AI did so, we would *never* gain on it, we would always be less intelligent, and the gap would always be growing.


Now, what has all this got to do with the topic?

1.  Evolution has as much to do with God as Gravity.  Gravity exists, regardless of what I think about God.  So does evolution.  The only possible connection would be to think that God created the natural processes of our universe, but this is a hypothesis which can not be tested, thus is a matter of personal belief only.

2.  You don't know what evolution IS.  I get this alot.  If you are giong to debate about a topic, for the love of whatever, please take the time to learn what it IS.  This is about the same as me trying to tell you about Finish grammar, which I know *nothing* about.

3.  In all likely hood, any further "advancement" in humanity as a species will be technological rather than biological. 

4.  It's quite possible that technology in even 100 years will be so advanced that people alive today would not only fail to understand it, but would be unable to do so.

5.  "Any technology sufficiently advanced will appear indistinguishable from magic."  Likewise, any species with sufficiently advanced tech will probably be able to do anything we can imaging a god doing.  Even if God does exist, and such a species also existed, a human would probably not be able to tell the difference between them!

6.  Science can not prove a negative.  At best, it can say there is not enough evidence to prove that God exists.  Any hypothesis about the existence and nature of God ever put forth has been one that can not be tested via the scientific method.  It is possible, but unlikely, that future advances will enable a hypothesis that can be properly tested.  Until that point, science is mute on the point of God, save that there is insufficient testable evidence.

7.  I happen to believe in God.  This fact has Nothing to do with anything else in this post.  If this statement changes your view on anything prior to it, it means you have an issue that you are letting colour your thinking.

8.  May be a smiley.

9. ...

10.  Profit.

11.  Sorry if that rambled a bit.  It gets away from me sometimes.

[Leafsnail]

Humanity is evolving, and will always continue to do so.  It will be in subtle ways, but it does happen.  I don't mean that, say, in 1000 years all humans will have 4 arms, but the gene pool will probably have shifted.  For instance, the sickle celled gene has become far more common in parts of Africa which are affected heavily by malaria, as malaria is a major risk to life there (although, of course, it has a nasty side effect if someone gets two sickle celled genes - but this is a sufficiently rare occurance for the benefit of resistance to malaria to outweigh it in some parts of Africa).  The genes for resistance to HIV, currently very rare, could become more common (although not universal) in areas where huge numbers of people are contracting HIV, such as in South Africa.

Basically, even if we are unlikely to evolve into a completely different species, that doesn't mean our gene pool is going to be completely static.  Where will it go?  Well, we don't know.  At the moment, evolution is not a predictive science - there is currently too much randomness for anyone to confidently (or even tentatively) predict which genes will stay and which will go.  For instance, at first glance something like homosexuality should be going - it reduces someone's chance to have children greatly, right?  But since its made up of such a huge variety of genes it's not that simple.  Having some of these genes can be beneficial to your chances of having children - increasing sociality, for instance.  Even single gene traits (and I stress that these are very rare) are hard to predict where they're going - for instance, Huntingdon's disease (a total genetic death sentence carried in a single allele) doesn't decrease someone's chance of having children, as it only kicks in after they've had children (and there is some evidence to suggest that the gene may cause greater fertillity, although this is unconfirmed).

TL ; DR

The human gene pool will probably keep moving, although subtly

It's basically impossible to predict where it will go, as it's just more complicated than most people seem to think

[cerapa]

I think that we will evolve into blobs of brain matter that are only kept alive through artificial systems. We would become smart enough to keep up with AIs and keep growing with our DNA constantly refreshed to keep all aging down. We would basically become organic supercomputers that would be able to interface with anything built.

And we could always go down the path instantly uploading everything in our brain at the moment of death and become one of the super intelligent AIs.

Before the blobification occurs, we might evolve additional graspers to work better with computers and such. Most of our evolution would involve keeping up with the advancing technology.


This is just a thought so dont start spewing out anything about that this cant happen.

[Kagus]

We'll become wholly integrated with our machines, purchasing mechanisms with the same ease we acquire clothing.  Think of it, an entire species made up of half-creature, half-machine amalgamations...


This sounds familiar.