Opinions - 2. Human Evolution

---

Alrighty.... Everyone take a deep breath, eat some chocolate, and reeelax. There is no reason to jump down each other's throats, and you all are behaving in a way that I know you would be embaressed about if this was in some kind of public place... (Stop being mad at him... You stop telling me what to do... I don't care what he's talking about... You should care what he's talking about...). Honestly, you bicker over the stupidest little things... And it's obvious that some of you are LOOKING for fights. Knock it off, por favor?

ask bob that one, it was his little theory

In reply to: Well unless people spend ALOT of time in this supposed other planet, enough for many generations to be produced, the likely hood of a mutation occuring that would let us cope better with gravety is extreamly low. Yeah I suppose you're right. If we ever did live on another world where we had this problem we wouldn't have enough time to adapt naturally. This is actually a part of this topic, altho Steve disagrees. We have reached a certain point in our evolution that we change our world around us so that we have no need to change naturally. So any changes that are made will probably be done intentionally and artificially. If we are to evolve further, we will probably do it to ourselves.Thanks CnC for adding to the thread, feel free to post more. I welcome any discussion on evolution in this thread EXCEPT debates over whether evolution is real or not.

You just said: "I welcome any discussion on evolution in this thread EXCEPT debates over whether evolution is real or not." But in the first sentence of first post in this thread, you said, "This isn't a rant about whether evolution is real or anything, this is in fact a question of man's ability to initiate human evolution." The sentences that followed reinforced your opening sentence. Is the topic evolving, pushed along by human intervention?In reply to:We have reached a certain point in our evolution that we change our world around us so that we have no need to change naturally. So any changes that are made will probably be done intentionally and artificially. If we are to evolve further, we will probably do it to ourselves.Yeah, there it is, the original subject of the thread.You've been talking about near-instantaneous changes in the environment. Complex creatures, like humans and mice, can't naturally evolve that quickly. Maybe they can adapt through natural selection to certain stresses in the environment, as from a the presence of a deadly toxin or pathogen, but at the cost of high mortality (for example, maybe only one person in 100,000 would survive). Those people would survive and reproduce, conferring their advantage on future generations.That's Darwinian evolution.Unless we're ready to see many if not most people die from the effects of severe environmental stresses, we need to engineer our way out of them, either by controlling the environment (not very practical, if we're going to live on Jupiter), or by engineering the creatures who will live there.So far no one has said much about how we would evolve ourselves, whether in response to environmental stress (global warming, high gravity, no ozone layer, etc.) or otherwise (the roads are getting so crowded that it's too difficult to get anywhere). In any case, it's likely to require using a lot of energy.

In reply to: Are you intentionally trying to make fundamentalist Christians look ridiculous? With all do respect Steve, this is quite ironic coming from you, as you are one who has repeatedly attempted to do this.

For believers, it's much worse when an actual fundamentalist Christian makes his religion look ridiculous than when someone who has no use at all for religion does the same. It makes me think of William Jennings Bryan's meltdown in Inherit the Wind.

The thing is, genetic changes happen regardless of environmental pressures. The only problem is that negative genetic changes are more likely to live on because more people survive now than they used to from things that might adversely affect their chance of survival in a situation where not everyone has plenty of food and good health care to correct or compensate problems (but not genetically correct them).Our lack of need to evolve doesn't affect whether we'll evolve or not. That's the theory of Lamarckian evolution, stemmed from the ideas of Lamarck that an organism would change to adapt to its environment (was shown to be incorrect). Darwin developed the idea that populations changed through pressures on populations, and the succesful individuals that ALREADY had the mutation would be more successful and have a greater chance of survival than other members of the population without the beneficial trait.If anything, we're moving towards deteriorating our genetic pool because of negative mutations, which are more common than positive mutations, that live on because of our great ability to save the lives of people who wouldn't live without modern technology (but what right do we have not to offer that to them? life is a valuable thing). The interesting thing though is if we can correct these problems through genetic engineering (back to the original topic of man made evolution). We can eliminate these genetic diseases and continue to save lives without the fear of what I just mentioned. The difficulty with genetic engineering though is it needs to be done at the single cell stage or by genetically altering a virus and letting it attack every cell in the human body relevant to the change(and hopefully not kill the person), and their reproductive cells if they want to pass it on. This has only been done in cases of children born without active immune systems. They make the virus relatively harmless and give it the gene for immunity that is missing, and the virus, by its nature, inserts its own DNA into its host cell (humans have tons of junk DNA from this that does nothing for the most part). This has given these children, who wouldn't otherwise have survived outside a clean plastic room, a chance to live normally like anyone else. Ever wonder where the term bubble boy came from? Originated from a case of this (before the treatment) with a child trapped in a sealed room to prevent any bacteria from getting in. He never got the ability to physically touch his parents by hugging or whatever else up until the point where something got in and he was dying.In a way, this means we've already done genetic engineering on some humans, thus "evolving" ourselves (or at least trying to eliminate a life threating trait, which is the only way this treatment would be used because it's very risky and a normal person would fight the spread of the virus before it went through the entire body).Mmmmm, genetics

Well, I guess if it's talking about how humans can make ourselves evolve we are already doing that through technology arn't we?
Before having children couple and can have their embreos screened for genetic deseases, selecting only embrios that are "desireable" to the parents, which could mean in future we as a species could evolve with less genetic defects should this become more popular etc etc. It's that whole "designer babies" thing...
Theoretically in future it could be taken so far as to pick other characteristics for our children: intelegence, Sporting ability, blonde hair, tall... pretty much any trait that the parents deam desireable
That's kinda human evolution through technology. I don't agree with people choosing to use these kinda of procedures for superfical things although I think that incases such as creating a child to be a tissue donner to save another child is ok aslong as it wont caulse harm to the child and that the parents actually did want another kid, they're not just creating a "spareparts baby"

extinction?

Yea, I always figgured that would happen eventually because it's recesive...Spose maybe blue eyes could meet the same fate one day.Blonde hair is over rated anyway

not these big baby blues!!

I HOPE not!!!! yummmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm....

Nah, people will continue to carry the recessive gene. Blond hair and blue eyes, being recessive, will continue to pronounce themselves as the recessive genes will still exist and couples having one recessive gene each will have as much a chance of passing on that gene as the other one. The only thing is that it only gets physically expressed if both genes are of that recessive trait. It'll be just as likely to be passed on, just not expressed as people with blond hair have kids with people who don't have blond hair, so it's not something that's likely to die out, just not be expressed as much.

my son is blonde and blue... I guess I bought us a couple more years with that one.

I'm guessing then you're German? Or Northern.

he is his own breed.. SEXY

That story about blonde's disappearing is a fraud! It's a put on! There will be enough blondes for everyone for a long time to come. Blue eyes may be another matter, but I have my father's hazels.

Someday you'll be able to engineer the genes of your zygote and have whatever color you want. Violet would be interesting.

It be pretty siick if we can design people. But if we abort them, no point.

Can I design my kid in the future? Just like painting! Whora!

I'm a dying breed? Sweet!

That story about blonde's disappearing is a fraud!I know but it was a bit of fun to post.>I'm guessing then you're German? Or Northern.Canadian with Northumbrian roots (his mom is part Irish, part Tansilvanian)>he is his own breed.. SEXYaww, thanks hon