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 human evolution |
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surving one way or the other. It was Carl Sagan who said that the ultimate survivability of the species will necessity a move off the planet and into space. I wonder once that process begins, how long it would take for man to evolve into new species. |
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The Evolution The next round of exponential evolution will occur over the next two decades as man learns how the body operates and how to fix it with genetics. The following round of exponential evolution will occur as "nanotechnology" and miniturazation of robotics allows for fighting disease, cleaning the body, telling our cells how to rejenerate and duplicate without the errors that shorten life. Finally, the greatest exponential evolution will occur as artifical intelligence passes the human brain in power and we begin to utilize vastly superior non-biological intelligence to rid the world of hunger, pestillence, sickness, war, etc. The possibilities are tremendous. |
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theloneranger 24-Dec-06, 19:33 |
so...... I am somewhat confused .......but hey that's why I am the loneranger. To late for me to expound on my many emotions and thoughts right now. you guys have Merry Christmas, maybe I will revisit this thread and try to clear up my confusion. |
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saintinsanity 24-Dec-06, 20:45 |
Merry Evolution There is evidence of human evolution. Many of us have deformed pinky toes that are slowly disappearing. Male pattern baldness also indicates a trend toward hairlessness, although some women defy my logic on this point. Because they are quite hairy themselves. I have rather pronouned patches of hair on my big toes. I feel like a hobbit sometimes, but I'm too tall. But I think Jeff has a good point. We keep the weak alive, and they reproduce. This reminds me of a theory I had, which I saw someone else also thought of, namely that there would be rich intelligent beautiful people and poor dumb ugly people. The other person said Giants and dwarves or something like that. But love shall prevail, overcoming shallow biases that lead to a seperation of mankind. Beauty and the beast, you know. I hope you all have a lovely holiday. Now for a peaceful dinner. |
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kingofpawns 25-Dec-06, 00:50 |
softaire... mechanism is cultural evolution. Just as organisms can evolve via mutation and recombination of genes, so to can such things as ideas and technology. Some ideas or recombinations of ideas "survive" and "reproduce" better than others. In science, ideas such as theories survive via tests against experience. In the evolution of religion, ideas about gods and such reproduce and survive with the conquerors of peoples. Biologically, we will continue to evolve, though it is difficult to say how since the selection forces operating are very complex and mediated by cultural evolution. |
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KOP My post was mostly about human evolution and how it will be affected by our new technologies. The possibilities of what are possible are based on the exponential increase in knowledge over the next 40 years or so. As you mention, it is difficult to say how the selection forces will operate because the increase in knowledge could be used for good or bad. An optomistic book called "The Singularity is Near" by Ray Kurtzweil says that humans will evolve into ways we now find impossible. This will be a merging of human evolution with technology which will change what it means to be human. I find the book to be very encouraging. There are three areas that will drive this evolution: genetics, nanotechnology, and robotics all assisted by the increase in artificial intelligence. Artificial intelligence will continue to become more powerful until around 2040 when it surpasses that of the human brain. Then it will increase exponentially. Genetics allows the "fixing" of the human body, curing disease, rejenerating parts, and applying that to food production ensures a food supply for a hungary world. Nanobots (technology and robotics) allow creating devices the size of human cells to enter the body and clean, fix, reprogram cells etc. to "fix" the body and regenerate youger, healthy cells. Humans will evolve, using non-biological intellience to upload and store their "essence" into computers so that they could be downloaded back in the event of a castastropy. Just as people put themselves into a state of cryogenics today so that they can be revived when a cure for their disease is found, people of tomorrow will upload copies of themselves for storage in the event they are smashed in an accident. Humans will merge with non-biological intelligence to live, work, and play in a "virtual reality" environment that will have all the experiences of real life, however, under the control of the individual and the good things can be "replayed" or changed at will. The "bad" things can be deleted. In this virtual reality, people will be able to change who they are, what they look like. They will be able to travel anywhere and experience anything. They will interact with other "people" (who are doing the same things) in this virtual reality world. In this sense, being in a virtual reality world but experiencing thinks as if reality, the question becomes "what does it mean to be human?". If we can change ourselves to look like anything we want and exist in a virtual reality world (our being downloaded from computer storage) but being conscious and able to experience and make decisions and being aware... without the need for bodies even... do we cease to be human? |
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KOP This seems absolutely true. I bet that mankind could not now survive without technology. Ut will be more so in the future. And, it will be absolutely on purpose as technology lengthens life; improves the standard of living; reduces hungar, crime, sickness & disease. "True, this is a possibility. But, it will actually take an extremely long time. One factor that has slowed down human evolution is the break down a barriers between populations. This means gene pools are relatively less isolated. To see significant evolution towards dependence on technology might take 100,000 years or more. Will there even be humans here that long? We must keep in mind that we often use technologies for evil purposes. I'm just not sure we can survive what we may discover." Some of this may be correct but the coming evolution will not take much time at all. If you are a "baby-boomer" or younger and can live another 20 years, you may live to be 500. In the next 20 years, genetics research and other medical research will learn how the cells in our bodies replicate, what makes a good health cell, and what makes for a bad cell. Genetics research will then know how to reprogram our cells to replicate properly, without disease and how to regenerate parts such as livers, hearts, bones, and even brain cells. At the same time and within the next 40 years, computer power will increase to match and then surpass the human brain while, at the same time, nanotechnology and robotics will shrink the size of computers to the size of the human cell so that they may travel within the bloodstream finding and fixing cells, removing impurities, regenerating/reporgramming our cells to be whatever they should be, as young and healthy cells. "It's clear that man is moving away from being able to survive in a purely darwinian type of way with our intelligence leading the way. If we went back to tooth and nail survival, are you really going to argue that the species is more fit for that type of living today? " No, I wouldn't argue that. I'd argue that man is going to be evolving soon into the "Singularity" where he has actually merged with non-biological intelligence and other technology, existing in some cases, as only computer data and programs although still fully functional, aware, observing, and experiencing "life" as any fully human can experiencing it, perhaps better in a "virtual reality" existance. |
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soulcrates 26-Dec-06, 21:43 |
Virtual Reality Existance Already there are types of completely computerized warfare, which as it seems our children are being programmed to fight in daily, with their X-Box 360's and Playstation 3, and computer games. Once we can just make kids confortable with the controls of our newest weapons, thru video games with the same controls, they won't know the difference between Actually killing people, destroying buildings and vehicles, and playing a game. We could conquer more space if we automated all our endeavors, with individual robotics controlled by humans back here on Earth. Saving lives, and money. The next phase of evolution in humanity is computerized. |
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kingofpawns 26-Dec-06, 22:40 |
boomer" or younger and can live another 20 years, you may live to be 500. In the next 20 years, genetics research and other medical research will learn how the cells in our bodies replicate, what makes a good health cell, and what makes for a bad cell. Genetics research will then know how to reprogram our cells to replicate properly, without disease and how to regenerate parts such as livers, hearts, bones, and even brain cells.** I think this is a bit optimistic. The complexity of genomes, gene regulation and expression makes this a very difficult problem. Unfortunately, the metaphor that genomes are a programs for organisms leads to the view that all we have to do is decode the program, and we understand the organism. Genomes, however, are more like networks of interacting genes and genes that interact with other physiological systems and environmental inputs. |
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saintinsanity 27-Dec-06, 02:21 |
It isn't entirely impossible though Plus, if everyone lived to be 500 we would have a whole new set of problems. Social security is already stretched thin, they say, not to mention overcrowding in the cities. The only solution is for people to move out of the cities, have their own little farms, become self sufficient. Yep, I sure wouldn't mind living to be 500. That would be cool. Of course, I will settle for 60. That's good enough. Then again, if I died tomorrow, I'd be happy to have experienced any of this at all. |
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soulcrates 27-Dec-06, 02:24 |
Pawn It's like you read my mind. Of course I would like to accomplish more in my life, but after seeing so many of my friends die too young, I'm content with the life I've lead, and that is all that really matters. Being at peace with yourself is under-rated. |
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According to Ray Kurtzweil For example, as genetics research progresses and it is learned how human cells divide and replicate and how to build healthy new cells versus damaged, unhealthy cells, the same technolgy will be used in crops and animals farming to vastly improve the food supply. Imagine crops not needing pesticides and yet immune to insect devistation and imagine fish and animals immune to disease. The technology is coming to feed a hungary world. Combine progress in genetics research with advances in nanotechnology and robotics, meaning miniturization of computers down to the size of a human blood cell. This will bring intelligence into the body so that we can scan, inside the body, for diseases and impurities. We can then can find and destroy them. We can remove impurities. In the 2030's or 2040's computer power will have increased until it finally surpasses that of the human brain. Once that happens, it will increase exponentially. Ray relies on this huge increase in intelligence to resolve our other worldly problems such as energy. Our new intelligence will solve the energy problem while cleaning the environment. Best of all... he predicts that although there are problems between peoples and nations today, that as sickness, hungar, lack of energy or expensive energy all dissappear and while quality of life improves for all, there will be reduced need (and then no need) for violence, hatred etc. People will spend their time traveling, learning, socializing. We will be able to live hundreds of years in productive and enjoyable lives. |
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tugger 27-Dec-06, 04:08 |
first, we have a problem in the immdeiate future with intelligence... it is my belief that the average intellect of the average person is lowering, and this is due to stupider people having more children... smart people are career minded, and have maybe two children in their late twenties and thirties... stupid people from derpived backgrounds are having litters of children by the time they're 25... of course, i am aware i am guilty of serious steroetyping here, but i am talking about a large range of people, where the shoe tends to fit most... and i am working on the assumption that intelligence is hereditory, but then i don't doubt that... second, our use of medicine is getting towards a total reliance on medicine... i think jeff has already hinted towards this, but the more we cure ailments and keep alive the weak, the weaker the gene pool becomes... i persoanlly do not take any medication when i suffer a cold... i just eat lots of fresh fruit... the rest of the time my diet is poor, lacking in vitamins.. yet i rarely fall ill... i genuinely believe my immune system is strong because i do not top it up with artificial defences... it's certainly not due to the vegetables i don't eat... anyway, i have a guest, so i'll be back later... |
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kingofpawns 02-Jan-07, 14:42 |
Still Evolving, Human Genes Tell New Story Published: March 7, 2006 Providing the strongest evidence yet that humans are still evolving, researchers have detected some 700 regions of the human genome where genes appear to have been reshaped by natural selection, a principal force of evolution, within the last 5,000 to 15,000 years. Many of these instances of selection may reflect the pressures that came to bear as people abandoned their hunting and gathering way of life for settlement and agriculture, a transition well under way in Europe and East Asia some 5,000 years ago. Under natural selection, beneficial genes become more common in a population as their owners have more progeny. Three populations were studied, Africans, East Asians and Europeans. In each, a mostly different set of genes had been favored by natural selection. The selected genes, which affect skin color, hair texture and bone structure, may underlie the present-day differences in racial appearance. The study of selected genes may help reconstruct many crucial events in the human past. It may also help physical anthropologists explain why people over the world have such a variety of distinctive appearances, even though their genes are on the whole similar, said Dr. Spencer Wells, director of the Genographic Project of the National Geographic Society. The finding adds substantially to the evidence that human evolution did not grind to a halt in the distant past, as is tacitly assumed by many social scientists. Even evolutionary psychologists, who interpret human behavior in terms of what the brain evolved to do, hold that the work of natural selection in shaping the human mind was completed in the pre-agricultural past, more than 10,000 years ago. "There is ample evidence that selection has been a major driving point in our evolution during the last 10,000 years, and there is no reason to suppose that it has stopped," said Jonathan Pritchard, a population geneticist at the University of Chicago who headed the study. Dr. Pritchard and his colleagues, Benjamin Voight, Sridhar Kudaravalli and Xiaoquan Wen, report their findings in today's issue of PLOS-Biology. Their data is based on DNA changes in three populations gathered by the HapMap project, which built on the decoding of the human genome in 2003. The data, though collected to help identify variant genes that contribute to disease, also give evidence of evolutionary change. The fingerprints of natural selection in DNA are hard to recognize. Just a handful of recently selected genes have previously been identified, like those that confer resistance to malaria or the ability to digest lactose in adulthood, an adaptation common in Northern Europeans whose ancestors thrived on cattle milk. But the authors of the HapMap study released last October found many other regions where selection seemed to have occurred, as did an analysis published in December by Robert K. Moysis of the University of California, Irvine. Dr. Pritchard's scan of the human genome differs from the previous two because he has developed a statistical test to identify just genes that have started to spread through populations in recent millennia and have not yet become universal, as many advantageous genes eventually do. The selected genes he has detected fall into a handful of functional categories, as might be expected if people were adapting to specific changes in their environment. Some are genes involved in digesting particular foods like the lactose-digesting gene common in Europeans. Some are genes that mediate taste and smell as well as detoxify plant poisons, perhaps signaling a shift in diet from wild foods to domesticated plants and animals. Dr. Pritchard estimates that the average point at which the selected genes started to become more common under the pressure of natural selection is 10,800 years ago in the African population and 6,600 years ago in the Asian and European populations. Dr. Richard G. Klein, a paleoanthropologist at Stanford, said that it was hard to correlate the specific gene changes in the three populations with events in the archaeological record, but that the timing and nature of the changes in the East Asians and Europeans seemed compatible with the shift to agriculture. Rice farming became widespread in China 6,000 to 7,000 years ago, and agriculture reached Europe from the Near East around the same time. Skeletons similar in form to modern Chinese are hard to find before that period, Dr. Klein said, and there are few European skeletons older than 10,000 years that look like modern Europeans. That suggests that a change in bone structure occurred in the two populations, perhaps in connection with the shift to agriculture. Dr. Pritchard's team found that several genes associated with embryonic development of the bones had been under selection in East Asians and Europeans, and these could be another sign of the forager-to-farmer transition, Dr. Klein said. Dr. Wells, of the National Geographic Society, said Dr. Pritchard's results were fascinating and would help anthropologists explain the immense diversity of human populations even though their genes are generally similar. The relative handful of selected genes that Dr. Pritchard's study has pinpointed may hold the answer, he said, adding, "Each gene has a story of some pressure we adapted to." Dr. Pritchard's list of selected genes also includes five that affect skin color. The selected versions of the genes occur solely in Europeans and are presumably responsible for pale skin. Anthropologists have generally assumed that the first modern humans to arrive in Europe some 45,000 years ago had the dark skin of their African origins, but soon acquired the paler skin needed to admit sunlight for vitamin D synthesis. The finding of five skin genes selected 6,600 years ago could imply that Europeans acquired their pale skin much more recently. Or, the selected genes may have been a reinforcement of a process established earlier, Dr. Pritchard said. The five genes show no sign of selective pressure in East Asians. Because Chinese and Japanese are also pale, Dr. Pritchard said, evolution must have accomplished the same goal in those populations by working through different genes or by changing the same genes — but many thousands of years before, so that the signal of selection is no longer visible to the new test. Dr. Pritchard also detected selection at work in brain genes, including a group known as microcephaly genes because, when disrupted, they cause people to be born with unusually small brains. Dr. Bruce Lahn, also of the University of Chicago, theorizes that successive changes in the microcephaly genes may have enabled the brain to enlarge in primate evolution, a process that may have continued in the recent human past. Last September, Dr. Lahn reported that one microcephaly gene had recently changed in Europeans and another in Europeans and Asians. He predicted that other brain genes would be found to have changed in other populations. Dr. Pritchard's test did not detect a signal of selection in Dr. Lahn's two genes, but that may just reflect limitations of the test, he and Dr. Lahn said. Dr. Pritchard found one microcephaly gene that had been selected for in Africans and another in Europeans and East Asians. Another brain gene, SNTG1, was under heavy selection in all three populations. "It seems like a really interesting gene, given our results, but there doesn't seem to be that much known about exactly what it's doing to the brain," Dr. Pritchard said. Dr. Wells said that it was not surprising the brain had continued to evolve along with other types of genes, but that nothing could be inferred about the nature of the selective pressure until the function of the selected genes was understood. The four populations analyzed in the HapMap project are the Yoruba of Nigeria, Han Chinese from Beijing, Japanese from Tokyo and a French collection of Utah families of European descent. The populations are assumed to be typical of sub-Saharan Africa, East Asia and Europe, but the representation, though presumably good enough for medical studies, may not be exact. Dr. Pritchard's test for selection rests on the fact that an advantageous mutation is inherited along with its gene and a large block of DNA in which the gene sits. If the improved gene spreads quickly, the DNA region that includes it will become less diverse across a population because so many people now carry the same sequence of DNA units at that location. Dr. Pritchard's test measures the difference in DNA diversity between those who carry a new gene and those who do not, and a significantly lesser diversity is taken as a sign of selection. The difference disappears when the improved gene has swept through the entire population, as eventually happens, so the test picks up only new gene variants on their way to becoming universal. The selected genes turned out to be quite different from one racial group to another. Dr. Pritchard's test identified 206 regions of the genome that are under selection in the Yorubans, 185 regions in East Asians and 188 in Europeans. The few overlaps between races concern genes that could have been spread by migration or else be instances of independent evolution, Dr. Pritchard said. |
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saintinsanity 02-Jan-07, 22:11 |
very interesting. |
